Aetna Ditches Obamacare Entirely
Robert Donachie /
Aetna announced Wednesday that it will stop offering Obamacare exchange plans in 2018, making it the latest major health insurance provider to completely opt out of former President Barack Obama’s landmark health care legislation.
The company cites massive losses among exchange participants and projects the problems to increase over the short term. Aetna will also cease to sell individual plans in Nebraska and Delaware, Bloomberg reports.
“Our individual commercial products lost nearly $700 million between 2014 and 2016, and are projected to lose more than $200 million in 2017 despite a significant reduction in membership,” an Aetna spokesman said in an email.
Aetna is not the only insurance company leaving Obamacare exchanges. Humana announced in February that it will pull out of the exchanges entirely in 2018. It was the first major insurance provider to opt out of Obamacare under President Donald Trump.
The company said it tried to provide plans on exchanges for years where it could offer a “viable product.” Its decision to stop offering plans came after “seeing signs of an unbalanced risk pool based on the results of the 2017 open enrollment period, therefore we’ve decided that we can’t continue to offer this coverage in 2018,” Bruce Broussard, chief executive of Humana, told reporters.
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