Shelby Livingston | May 10, 2017
National health insurer Aetna said Wednesday that it has exited all the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges for 2018.
Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna announced it will stop selling individual insurance plans on and off the exchanges in Nebraska and Delaware in 2018, just weeks after pulling out of the exchanges in Iowa and Virginia.
Aetna said it expects to lose $200 million on its individual plans this year. It insures just 255,000 members in the individual market. In 2016, the insurer said it lost $450 million and insured 964,000 members.
“Those losses are the result of marketplace structural issues that have led to co-op failures and carrier exits, and subsequent risk pool deterioration,” the company said in a statement.
With Aetna’s departure, Nebraska and Delaware are both left with a sole insurer, said Cynthia Cox, associate director for health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Iowa is also left with a single insurer—Medica—because of Aetna’s planned exit.
Aetna sold plans on the exchanges in just four states in 2017, down from 11 in 2016.
News outlets reported Wednesday that Aetna was expected to enter the exchange in Nevada, because it won a Medicaid managed-care contract in the state. Nevada provides incentives to the Medicaid managed-care insurers it contracts with to also sell plans on its insurance exchange.
But T.J. Crawford, spokesman for Aetna, declined to comment on the insurer’s “potential Nevada presence.”
Source: Modern Healthcare
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20170510/NEWS/170519969