U.S. healthcare spending is over $5 trillion a year. That’s $5,000 billion. So the “tens of billions in profits” you’re pointing to accounts for very little of what people spend on healthcare.

That’s what I mean when I refer to facile ideological reactions. For many people, “profits” are the problem, and they don’t care that health insurers on average are less profitable than Subway franchises. It’s just the mirror image of people who say the New York MTA is a disaster because the government is running it, and don’t care that governments in other countries manage to run cost-efficient train systems.