Truly. Aetna, United Healthcare, Anthem, etc are examples of industry that does not need to exist, and exist only to serve the status quo.

Each of those are companies worth billions of dollars that could be instead used to lower the individual cost of providing health insurance.

As you say, this would of course be unsavory in some respects as those companies employ a lot of people. It's not a very economically productive industry though, the main output seems to be consuming patients' and doctors' time, causing financial anguish, and causing stress among people as to whether or not if their condition will be covered.

They do perform one useful service: forcing a hospital that tries to issue a $100,000 bill that should be $10,000 to reissue it, and not leave the patient saddled with a giant debt.

(Medicaid & Medicare claims processors do the same thing. Medicaid claims processing is mostly handled by private, third-party insurers now, and seems to be able to do so more efficiently and cheaply than when it was being run directly by states; the savings is mostly in the area of catching fraud.)