There are a variety of services necessary for a civilization to function.
I am not against profit at all providing competition/regulation exists to keep players honest; however, police and fire are not run for profit. Certainly one needs to pay people properly, but it never gets into earnings per share or the head people earning millions or tens of millions per annum.
The cost per capita of health care in Germany is roughly half of what it is in the US. If we are to get proper access to health care for all then it has to be less expensive - something I think is very doable if lobbying is gotten under control and competition exists.
Insurance, pharma, suing, edu costs, fraud, etc. all serve to make health care a lot more expensive than it should be.
If one has a fire - the fire department shows up regardless of one's net worth, yet not the case with medical treatment. The problem is both are services one cannot do without.
Insurance in the US used to be non-profit and private - no reason we can't see a return to this.
Frivolous suing raises the cost of medicine and needs to be reined in.
Pharma, besides being expensive, is a protected and self serving industry. I think it needs competition from Eastern, holistic and other ways of tackling the problem and above all we need to look for cures and start treating the underlying causes rather that treating symptoms = a lot more lucrative.
Pharma, FDA, R&D, a lot of doctors effectively block competition and while one needs to be mindful of creating snake oil salesmen I do think alternatives would force pharma to come up with better solutions and cut their margins.
So maybe one still has profit margins, but the margins become less fat and thus reduces the cost.
Education - kind of hard for a doctor not to charge high fees when liability insurance is so high and they come out of 8 years of university/medical school with $400k in debt. Why does university and grad school cost so much and always rise above and beyond inflation?
I see parallels between our current medical system and Marcus Crassus' fire brigade scam in ancient Rome. His fire brigades would show up and buy the properties on fire at a discount and if the owner would not sell he would let them burn to the ground.
Kinda like our current medical system - no cash/insurance - no service = one's body is left to burn to the ground so to speak.
In closing some profit is OK, but costs have to be brought down and gouging done away with.
Balance in all things is good.