Aetna announced late Wednesday it will withdraw from the last two Obamacare exchange states in which it was still participating, taking one of the nation’s insurance giants off the law’s markets entirely next year.
Delaware and Nebraska were the final two states to go. Aetna is still offering insurance on the marketplaces there in 2017, as well as in Iowa and Virginia. But not in 2018.
Aetna, which once offered coverage in 15 states through the exchanges, has suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. If its projection of finishing $200 million in the red this year holds up, the company’s losses since 2014 would creep closer to $1 billion.
As CNN Money reports, there’s generally been two reasons why insurers have backed off the exchanges:
The first issue relates directly to what conservatives have been trying to address in health care reform. But their early difficulties in moving a plan through Congress hasn’t provided the market with any certainty that the matter will be resolved any time soon.
