The company has declined to say how many IL customers it serves.
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SEE MORE: Obamacare’s Almost Six Years Old.
Next year Aetna says it will reduce its participation in public exchanges that serve individuals from 778 to 242 counties. Since January of 2014 the health insurer says it has taken a pre-tax loss of $430 million its exchange business including a pre-tax loss of $200 million on exchange business in the second quarter.
“If the Humana transaction is eventually blocked, which we don’t believe it will be, the underlying logic of our written response to DOJ would still apply with regard to the public exchanges where we will participate in 2017”, said the representative.
Aetna, a major insurer that announced that it was significantly scaling back its Obamacare exchange participation this week, warned in a letter to Department of Justice sent in July that it would pull out of a significant portion of the marketplaces if its proposed merger with Humana was blocked.
In late July, the DOJ chose to file a lawsuit to stop the merger of Aetna and Humana, which contributed to the decision to roll back its ACA offerings. “Fifty-five percent of our individual on-exchange membership is new in 2016, and in the second quarter we saw individuals in need of high-cost care represent an even larger share of our on-exchange population”.
Blue Cross Blue Shield is attributing the hike to rising healthcare costs. The company cited its mushrooming financial losses from the exchange business, echoing other major insurers that are also pulling back from the exchanges, including UnitedHealth Group Inc. If insurance companies keep leaving Obamacare in the name of making a profit, the program nationally could be undermined in years to come.
“If they’re now receiving government subsidies that may not continue with an off-exchange product”, said Aetna spokesman Rohan Hutchings.
State officials had asked Blue Cross Blue Shield of IL to waive deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses for Land of Lincoln members who move to Blue Cross Blue Shield.
“It’s just not a sustainable model”, she said.
The nation’s third-largest insurer has not released specifics on how many clients in Texas use the exchange.
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In an opinion piece, the New York Times editorial board wrote said that while it was reasonable to expect tweaks to the ACA, the Aetna decision in no way signaled the law’s death.
