Health insurer Humana is leaving the Affordable Care Act’s public insurance exchanges for next year as it regroups after cancelling ending its proposed combination with rival insurer Aetna.
Humana Inc. covers about 150,000 people on exchanges in 11 states.
The insurer said on February 14 that it had taken several actions to improve that business, but it was still seeing signs of unbalanced risk in that customer population. Health insurers have struggled to attract enough healthy people to their risk pools to balance the claims they incur from people with expensive medical conditions.
Humana and Aetna said earlier the same day that they were calling off Aetna’s roughly $34 billion acquisition of Humana. That deal already had been rejected by a federal judge who was worried about its impact on competition.
The announcement came several days after another federal judge shot down a tie-up between two other massive insurers. Blue Cross-Blue Shield carrier Anthem Inc. is attempting to buy Cigna Corp. for $48 billion. Anthem is appealing that decision.
Aetna, the nation’s third largest insurer, had announced its bid for Humana in 2015. The deal would have given Aetna the opportunity to expand significantly its presence in Medicare Advantage coverage, which involves privately run versions of the federal Medicare program for people who are over 65 or disabled.
But Aetna’s attempt to gobble up the nation’s fifth largest health insurer brought in the Department of Justice, which sued last summer to block that deal and the Anthem-Cigna combination.
