It will continue to offer individual plans off the exchange, he said.
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Aetna serves about 31,000 Pennsylvanians through the marketplace, about 6 percent of the state’s individual health insurance market, according to the Pennsylvania Insurance Department. The company will only continue offering exchange plans in Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, and Virginia.
“Lots of that magnitude couldn’t continue for subsequent years so we had to make a decision on reducing costs”, Hutchings said.
Aetna hasn’t ruled out a future expansion on the exchanges “should there be meaningful exchange-related policy improvements”, Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini said in a statement.
A GOP-led Congress, choking off what some critics of the Affordable Care Act called a bailout, blocked “risk corridor” money under the Affordable Care Act created to help insurers cover losses.
Another major health insurance company is drastically scaling back its Obamacare participation, citing unsustainable financial losses. The exchanges are available in all states to allow people to shop for federally required health coverage.
An estimated 11 million people, of whom tens of thousands are living with HIV, have purchased health insurance through the Affordable Care Act exchanges to date.
The law also encompasses far more than the exchanges, she noted, including Medicaid expansion, health-insurance coverage expansions, changes to how people qualify for insurance coverage and more.
“Aetna may not like the Justice Department’s decision to challenge its merger, and it has every right to fight that decision in court”.
If you have Aetna health insurance through your work or you bought it yourself on a private exchange, you aren’t affected by the announcement, and nothing will change.
An estimated 10 million people have signed up for Obamacare to date – less than half the amount originally expected.
Another reason exchanges are unprofitable for big insurers has to do with the products they are selling.
“The greatest concern for people living with HIV – or people with any chronic health condition – is that too many insurers will exit the market, making it harder to find a plan that includes someone’s current provider while remaining affordable”, said John Peller, president and CEO of AIDS Foundation of Chicago. But in rural areas, consumers on the exchanges may only have one or two insurers to choose from.
Aetna said it will reduce its individual public exchange participation from 778 to 242 USA counties for 2017.
The company will stop offering individual plans in about two-thirds of the now covered counties in 2017, reducing its footprint to 242 counties next year, according to a press release issued Monday.
An Independence Blue Cross official said in the spring that in 2015 it experienced a significant increase in the use of health services by individual exchange members.
Insurers have been saying Obamacare customers are, overall, less healthy than the companies need them to be so that the medical costs covered by the plans don’t exceed the premiums the customers pay in each month.
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Aetna has said it has been swamped with higher than expected costs, particularly from pricey specialty drugs.
