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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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Approximately 1-2 million people employed in the mass bureacracy of claims processing and validation would lose their jobs.
That's how much of a gargantuan amount of bullshit the healthcare industry is, its so big that at this point, assuming the rest of the economy was doing fine, switching to universal health care would create a moderate recession, because so many bullshit jobs would no longer nerd to exist.
Obviously it would be a massive net economic benefit, but at this point, medicine is gonna sting a bit.
Those "same" (number of) people would be needed to process the claims that needed to be approved by the nationwide system that replaced "for profit" healthcare.
That's not quite true. Medical billing here is hopelessly complicated, a universal system would likely have universal rules, and streamline the process of billing and payments.
So if a medical practice now needs 5 people to do the insurance billing, it might need only one if there was one payer (Medicare) or two if there was a German sort of system, but not 5.
No. Wrong.
As others have outlined in greater detail... no, you'd have a massive simplification and standardization of such forms, thus a massive reduction in the amount of 'needed' work of such kind.
The entire way the modern US healthcare system works is by making there be so many abstract layers and processes going on at the same time, that it requires an inordinate amount of time and effort to even actually map out what those layers and processes are, much less who is actually responsible for what particular decision or mistake.
And that is the point of it. Its is insanely complex and opaque by design, because it allows them do functionally do whatever they want, and be able to say its all done for compliance's sake.
So, yeah, if you just flatten all that... ~90% of it no longer needs to exist.
Or... the real funny part here is... if we stick with the system as it is, well, this kind of shit is gonna be done by LLMs. So we will probably end up having the same employment void developing under the current hypercapitalist paradigm as well.
I'm from Canada, and I know a surgeon and he has one admin. One (1) secretary that handles patient booking, billing, and payments. The benefit of a single payer system is there's one payer. The government. One set of forms to comply with. No rejections (almost always. Rejections come from foreigners or out of province coverage when determining which province is responsible for paying)
His software system (government provided) auto fills 99% of it. That's why he can have one (1) secretary. The government side Idk but it's certainly not insane ratios like the US since the process is far more streamlined and doesn't rely on appeals or rejections to racketeer more money out of doctors and patients. What's really sad is Americans are so conditioned to believe their way of life is somehow normal, that orphans must also be crushed somehow in Europe or Canada.
Yeah, you go into a doctor's office and they'll have 5 secretaries to handle all that paper work. I didnt do Healthcare, but for a minute I was a service administrator for a car dealership who's job, among 7 of us, was to do the billing and warranty/insurance claims. The paperwork was insane and had to be presented in a precise way or it wasn't accepted. I can only imagine what hoops health insurance makes these offices jump through.
you can have both private and public, private if you want to see someone faster or more specialized care. and everyone gets public regardless of income. most states have very small maximum limit on if you can get medi-caid. funny how military service members have universal healthcare, a "public version of them" and they arnt in debt. it can be done, the us chooses not to because GOP/DNC would start to lose alot of political power.