Larry, that is just about what I found. The conspiracy you uncovered is disturbing.
I have found no doctors who are willing to do a basic med exam except for those who are AMEs. They want to do the third class medical and call it Basic Med.
The lesson here is that we have a large laboratory of experimentation, they are sport pilots, who have no third class medical. They fly sport aircraft and the vast majority of that population is old guys who have enough money for an overpriced sport aircraft but cannot pass a third class medical.
Clearly if the third class medical had any impact on preventing accidents caused by pilot incapacitation they would all be dead. So the third class medical was and is unnecessary and it always was.
The FAA’s behavior was outrageous too. They would tell a pilot who had a stent in his heart to resolve a blockage to get a non-medically necessary angeogram, which the pilot had to pay out of pocket for. He would send the results overnight to the FAA in OKC and months later call to ask where his special issuance medical is. The FAA would only then open the envelope and say to him on the phone “Oh, your angeogram is four months old, get another one.” Outrageous.
The FAA has spent years making everyone involved with them miserable and they badly need to be corrected.
Their approach to certification is outrageous too. The purpose of certification is not to make sure everything for aircraft costs millions of dollars, it’s to make sure the plane doesn’t crash. Those same sport and experimental aircraft can use a nice, all digital autopilot that costs under $1,000, but for a certified plane it can be $24,000, and it’s much more primitive.