Last night I linked to a letter from Aetna to the Department of Justice explaining what they would do if their merger with Humana wasn’t approved. The answer, basically, was that they’d pull out of a bunch of Obamacare exchanges. As insurance pro Richard Mayhew puts it:
TLDR: Nice exchanges there, be a pity if anything happened.
But Mayhew points out something else. Aetna claims that they’re not really threatening the Obama administration. They’re losing money! If the merger isn’t approved, they really have no choice but to pull back from the exchanges. It’s sad, but what are you gonna do?
And yet—in 2015 they made $13.6 million in the individual market in Pennsylvania. That’s a very healthy 19 percent of premium revenue. But one of the states they’re pulling back from is…Pennsylvania. Nice, profitable, Democratic-leaning Pennsylvania. It’s very peculiar, isn’t it?
