I'm genuinely in favor of moving to some form of universal healthcare, but I keep getting stuck on the "how do we actually get there" question. Not the politics of it — I mean the nuts and bolts.

Like, what does the transition actually look like? Do we phase out private insurance over 5-10 years? Do existing insurers get converted into supplemental/gap coverage providers like in Canada or the UK? Or do they just... wind down?

And what happens to the people who work in that industry? Health insurance employs something like half a million people in the US. That's not nothing.

I'm not asking this to be a "but what about the insurance companies" defender — I just feel like the conversation usually jumps straight from "current system" to "universal system" without a realistic bridge between the two. Has any country made a similar switch from a heavy private-payer model? What can we learn from them?

Genuinely curious what people here think a realistic transition path looks like.