Bertko said 11 plans in California are all either making money or close to breaking even. California’s experience appears to square with accounts that smaller insurers familiar with low-income patients and offer narrow groups of physicians and hospitals are making a go on the exchanges.
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Since the marketplaces launched in 2014, more than 800,000 Ohioans have signed up for marketplace or expanded Medicaid coverage under President Barack Obama’s signature health reform law.
The state Insurance Department says Blue Cross and UnitedHealthcare now cover about 8,500 people in Pinal County.
“Aetna’s decision to leave the Affordable Care Act’s public marketplaces is the latest blow to this broken law that is slowly imploding under its regulatory red tape”, said Dan Kowalski, the campaign’s deputy national policy director. “Jan Crawford looks at the latest insurer saying it can not afford Obamacare”.
While insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealth are scaling back their exchange participation, competitors like Cigna and Molina Healthcare are expanding.
And only one remaining insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia, will offer plans throughout the state in 2017.
“Effectively pulling out of almost 70 percent of the counties where it offers health plans through Affordable Care Act exchanges”, she said. The company reported $200 million in pre-tax losses in the second quarter of 2016 alone.
Aetna, however, has been one of the largest Obamacare providers since the exchanges launched two years ago.
“As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision”, said Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini in a written statement.
Individual insurance companies, like Aetna, can decide to offer their coverage on the exchange in some or all states but the exchanges usually have poorer or less healthy participants. Aetna, the managed healthcare giant, announced it will join more than 40 other insurers in abandoning Obamacare. Bertolini said in April, for example, that in order to enroll the number of consumers Aetna has on the marketplace, it would expect to spend up to $1.2 billion, so “we see this as a good investment”. Companies are citing losses on the exchanges because older, sicker-than-expected people are signing up for insurance, and not enough young and healthy people are buying coverage. In June the Kaiser Family Foundation issued a report projecting benchmark silver plan premiums may increase by 10% next year in 14 major metro areas.
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“I just gave a 43% rate increase to Humana to keep them here”, said Mike Chaney, Mississippi’s insurance commissioner, adding that the insurer hadn’t threatened to pull out if it didn’t get the boost. United Healthcare has also said it will withdraw from the OH marketplace next year. “They are basically saying we can no longer justify to our shareholders participation in these failing exchanges”.
