There would be a need for jobs, for sure. But there would be a lot of redundancy if your goal was to give everyone a job in the new system.

Let's say there are 10 insurance companies and we suddenly had to get down to one organization. So that's 10 CEOs down to 1 - what jobs do the other 9 get? The further down the chain of command the more redundancy you get. You could probably run the new administration with the headcount from two of those 10 companies, maybe even less since one system would allow for streamlined optimizations of policy and admin work.

Very good point. There is a lot of complexity to the issue, but this is ELI5, so I thought it best to keep it simple.

I didn't say that it was the right system, only that this is one of the realities of doing away with healthcare for profit.

If the US government suddenly banned privatized communications, and everyone had to use a new national internet and cell phone network - wouldn't a lot of people doing redundant jobs at ATT, Verizon, TMobile and other telcoms be suddenly out of work?

Not acknowledging that aspect of making a change over to universal healthcare is to only see the forest for the trees.

Not even close to the same scale. Single payer is a type of universal healthcare. In a nutshell, it means that a single entity is contracted to provide healthcare. They would need some admin, but nothing to the scale that the US system has. With a single payer system, there wouldn't be the need to verify insurance coverage, determine costs, etc. It is what it is.

Not even close. There is a whole industry within the industry. Insurance companies have sales teams who are responsible for bringing in new hospitals to be "in network" as well as bringing in new employers and private citizens to use their insurance over someone else's. Then think about every insurance company and the amount of people in leadership roles that would no longer be needed - thousands of C level and VP level executives who "run" the various companies that wouldn't be needed anymore.

Then you have all of the customer service agents who answer questions about coverage to customers. Then you have a whole bunch of folks, like my wife, whose sole job is to verify that your insurance will cover the procedure you just scheduled for yourself.

Then you have all of the various ancillary jobs associated with those roles, admin, IT, etc. Not to mention all of the people that work for drug and equipment companies who "lobby" the insurance companies to cover certain drugs and what the costs would be.

Then you look at how many companies are in the industry to make a profit - drug companies for example. You start dictating to them at the government level how much they can charge for a drug or piece of equipment, suddenly they don't have an incentive to innovate and so people are laid off.

Medicine is a big business machine in the US.

Look up largest employers by state, so many of them are hospital networks. A lot of those jobs are admin related to dealing with the insurance companies.

Universal healthcare is publicly provided and funded healthcare. Free and accessible to everyone.

The critics of this type of system argue that the quality of the care is subpar because there is no profit in it for the provider to give good care only the basic level.

Proponents of it argue that other countries that have it do not have any issues with the level of care they receive.

It would be a difficult thing to implement in the US because the insurance and healthcare industries are so large at the present time. A lot of large companies would suddenly not be needed, which would cause a very large number of people to be suddenly unemployed.

A few things at play here. Number one is buying power. These large manufacturers buy some many components that they pay much less than the average wholesale price. They also have "proprietary" components that may use a lesser material to make it more affordable. An example would be motherboards in a Dell or HP - they are notoriously difficult to upgrade because they are proprietary and don't have room for much else.

The second thing they have going for them is volume of sales. They sell such a large number of products that they are able to take less margin and still turn a profit. Walmart is a perfect example of this.

Lastly, you should see a theme here, is scale of production. They produce so many of the same or similar things that they can take advantage of efficiencies in mass production. Think of a smaller boutique manufacturer, their price is usually a little higher because they are hand made to order products - a feature they try to sell you on. Someone like Dell or HP has thousands of the same laptop sitting in a box ready to be shipped out.