The announced withdrawal of health insurance giant Aetna from Obamacare exchanges this week has put the healthcare law back in the thicket of political debate.
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Alabama, Alaska and Oklahoma are among the states that will have one health insurer selling individual coverage on their exchanges next year. “While this reduces the health insurance plans available to Pennsylvanians in the individual market, all Pennsylvanians continue to have choices”.
Aetna late Monday announced that a second-quarter pre-tax loss of $200 million from its individual insurance coverage helped it decide to limit exposure to the exchanges.
But Aetna might have just bitten off more than they meant to.
Yuma residents are going to have fewer options to choose from as more insurances drop Obamacare. It will sell coverage on exchanges in 242 counties next year, down from 778. But United is pulling out of Arizona and Blue Cross is not offering plans there next year.
Officials at fast-growing CareSource, a downtown Dayton-based Medicaid managed care provider and private health insurer with operations in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and West Virginia, say they view the absence of Aetna and other competitors as an opportunity to grow share in the markets they abandon.
UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Humana Inc. have cited similar concerns about financial losses on the Obamacare exchanges and have also cut back most of their plans for 2017. The company covered about 838,000 people through the individual exchanges at the end of the second quarter.
He continued, “With high consumer satisfaction, more people getting care, and an improving risk pool, incoming data continue to show that the future of the Marketplace is strong”.
The Congressional Budget Office projected previous year that 21 million people would participate in the exchanges.
Insurers say that a smaller marketplace has meant that it’s been harder to offset the costs of covering sick people – who under the ACA are not allowed to be denied coverage – with healthy ones, who have not been as eager to sign up as expected.
The problem stems from the fact that ACA plan members tend to rack up high medical bills, which the federal risk adjustment program has not fully offset, causing insurers to lose money on the exchanges.
As more healthcare insurers pull out of the Obamacare market, Democratic and Republican lawmakers might agree to modify the law, Kaiser Family Foundation Vice President Larry Levitt told CNBC.
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In the letter to the DOJ, Aetna said it would be a while before the company recouped the more than two years worth of investments it made in the government-subsidized insurance plans under Obamacare, Reuters reports.
