The way the insurance business usually works is total claims about equals total premiums paid. Their profits only come from investing the premiums until they have to pay the claims. Many insurance companies are publicly traded so if they truly have unusually good profits you can own a piece of the action. In reality they are not especially great profit generators.
I worked for a pharmaceutical company and in my opinion it was very much like a government job being that they are highly regulated by the FDA. 90% of the work was hoop jumping and overhead. It's one thing to jump through hoops to enforce best practices but what I saw was much wasted effort not focused on doing real work. It's a highly bloated and inefficient government job that only works because of monopoly-sized profits if they make it through all the hoops.
The only reason that the profits are "monopoly-sized" is because we consume so much. Ask a drug rep who sells an ARB or an SRI if they feel like they have a monopoly.
As for the rest of your post, I agree. Big pharma is about jumping through hoops, nothing more or less.
I agree with your observations. The ones regarding the pharmaceutical industry are interesting, because the companies themselves are sortof held hostage by the government. Do this, do that, don’t do that, no change that...
We give the government the power, then damn the company for doing precisely what the government demands they do. Hardly anyone damns the government for what they make the companies do.