“That deterioration, and not the DOJ challenge to our Humana transaction, is ultimately what drove us to announce the narrowing of our public exchange presence for the 2017 plan year”, Crawford said.
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“Despite the Affordable Care Act bringing them millions more paying customers than ever before, these companies are more concerned with making huge profits than ensuring access to health care for all Americans”, Sanders said.
There is a chance, however, that even those people will be forced to change plans no matter what. But insurers say this relatively small slice of business has generated huge losses since they started paying claims for it in 2014.
That means no individual exchange plans in some states under the Aetna name or affiliated brands such as Coventry, a spokesman said. Following a similar path as other insurers – including the leading USA health insurance provider, United Health Group – Aetna blamed its losses on heavier than expected use of the health care plans by conditions requiring high-cost care.
Aetna, the nation’s third-largest insurer, says it will limit its participation in the exchanges to four states in 2017, down from 15 this 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. But it also scaled back quickly and only plans to offer policies in three states next year, Nevada, Virginia and NY. Aetna’s decision doesn’t affect people covered by the company this year, but when they look for coverage next year, they’ll need to pick a new insurer.
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.
It will offer off-exchange individual products in 2017 in most of the counties in which it has ended its public exchange participation.
Aetna had losses of $200 million on ACA plans in the second quarter, which it said accounted for almost half of its total losses on individual health coverage since the exchange plans debuted in January 2014. A competitor of Aetna, UnitedHealth Group, has also withdrawn. “More healthy people need to be encouraged to sign up”, Levitt said by email.
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Open enrollment for the 2017 plan year starts November 1, according to HealthCare.gov. We will continue to evaluate our participation in individual public exchanges while gaining additional insight from the counties where we will maintain our presence, and may expand our footprint in the future should there be meaningful exchange-related policy improvements.
