The debate could lead Republicans to once again attempt to scrap the legislation next year, or for Democrats to tweak it. Politicians weighed in this week on what Aetna’s decision meant, with GOP presidential candidate Donald J. Trump tweeting it was “only the beginning”.
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That story line got more complicated Wednesday after the Huffington Post reported Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini sent a letter to the Justice Department on July 5 threatening to withdraw from the Obamacare marketplaces if the government sued to block his company’s planned merger with Humana.
If Aetna follows through, thousands of people who now have health care will to have to scramble to find coverage next year.
The letter, obtained by the Huffington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request, was in response to the DOJ asking if the outcome of the attempted deal would affect Aetna’s participation in Obamacare. The Hartford, Connecticut-based insurer will sell on exchanges in Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska and Virginia next year. And if all insurers active in each state’s individual insurance market that year had participated in the state health insurance marketplace, that premium would be 11.1% lower, and federal subsidies in 2014 would be reduced by $1.7 billion.
Clinton has long said she would build on Obamacare’s success, rejecting her primary opponent Bernie Sanders’ push to have the federal government take over health care. SC and most of North Carolina could join that list due to the Aetna decision, Cox noted.
“Without getting into the heads of Aetna’s executives, it’s hard to say whether they were just describing a financial fact that they would have to pull out of the ACA marketplaces if the merger were blocked, or if they were making a thinly veiled threat”, Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation wrote in an e-mail.
Health care company Aetna says it’s pulling its plans off the individual insurance exchanges in Georgia and 10 other states next year, making it the latest major insurer to deal a blow to President Obama’s signature health care law. Critics say that the company is retaliating against the government because the Department of Justice is fighting a proposed merger between Aetna, the country’s third-largest insurer, and Humana, the fifth-largest.
The company said in the letter that an antitrust suit or a successful prevention of its deal would create financial strains that would force it to pull back from the exchanges, where it was losing money.
In the letter to DOJ, Bertolini said Aetna has been operating in the exchanges at a “substantial loss” and said it would be “some time before we recoup our investment”.
Haislmaier says that Aetna’s exit is one reason to believe the insurance market is headed to a place where there will only be one or two insurers operating in every state.
Aetna’s departure from the health law marketplace in Arizona threatens to leave one county without any options for next year.
While insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealth are scaling back their exchange participation, competitors like Cigna and Molina Healthcare are expanding.
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The DOJ declined to comment.
