by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Health insurers just can’t stand competition.
Aetna, the third largest health insurer in the US, announced Monday night that it would exit the health insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act in 11 of the 15 states where it participates in them. It claimed that it had lost “more than $430 million since January 2014” by selling insurance to individual participants in these exchanges. It didn’t say how it figured that – for example by counting imaginary profits it could have extracted if there had been no competition.