[potato3732842]

Yeah, they're real good at doing needless work with a smile on their face.

Next time you go to a GP's office for no reason other than to gatekeep a specialist you know you need ask yourself what all those people are being paid for any why the situation deserves anything more than someone on the order of an RN saying "yeah looks like an infection to me" via a screen, to pick but one example.

Like all bureaucracy, every single part of the system has some skin deep reason to justify its existence or scope but when you take a step back and look at it all you'll find that huge swaths are either redundant or completely unnecessary, and that the industry is rife with this BS from top to bottom and we're all made effectively poorer for it.

[mindslight]

You might not even notice it just from dealing with one referral. It really starts to gall when you see the pattern of nearly every actor in the system doing the least amount possible and then quickly passing responsibility on to someone else, often via yourself. The only exceptions I've seen are hospital doctors when there is an immediate acute problem that they can't just punt, and pediatrics where frequent repeating followups can be justified. Healthcare workers join this system because they want to help people, but the administrative parasites grind up their attention into tiny pieces until it is all but meaningless.