Anthem is an HMO, not "just" an insurance company. They tend to make higher margins specifically because they're more cost efficient and correspondingly have more profit, so extrapolating from that is somewhat misleading.
But even using your numbers, $200B is not "the problem" here -- that's around 5% of the money being spent, and because of the nature of insurance tends to scale down with other costs and remain at the same percentage of the then lower absolute costs when other costs are reduced.
> Pfizer financials: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PFE/financials/ - $42B profit on $53B revenue. The pharmaceutical industry in the US is $935B so there's another ~$750B in savings. We're at $950B now.
People still want Lipitor and Zoloft, so that's all still there unless you regulate drug prices, which you can do or not independent of single payer (but that has its own problems).
And you can't just write off all profits as "we don't need that let's get rid of it" -- it's just measuring risk adjusted reward on capital. To have a hospital you have to put down millions of dollars to buy MRI machines and everything else, which then gets paid back with interest over a period of years. If it's private that comes from the investors and then the "profit" is their interest on the investment. Making the hospital "public" doesn't deprive you of the need to raise money to pay for equipment and then pay interest on it, unless you're going to pay 100% of the costs up front out of taxes in year zero -- and deprive the taxpayers of the interest they would have collected on the same money in the meantime.
TANSTAAFL.
