Aetna Withdrawing from Colorado Individual Health Insurance Market

by Jay on January 28, 2011

Aetna no longer offers health insurance plans for individuals, families and the self employed plans in Colorado.  Their explanation:

After reviewing our portfolio of Individual health insurance plans in Colorado, we determined we can no longer meet the needs of our customers while remaining competitive in the individual health insurance market.

While this decision was not easy, a number of factors were considered before making this important decision. In keeping with the best interests of our customers, we believe there are other insurers who can better meet their needs.

All existing policyholders will be notified by mail on or about February 1, 2011.

While we will continue to administer their individual health plan for at least another year, policyholders are strongly encouraged to seek alternative health insurance coverage prior to their policy termination date indicated above.

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  • http://www.joelrosenblum-insurance.com Joel Rosenblum

    Thanks for the notification. I am not surprised.

    I only have a dozen cases with them, but would have liked to have heard this news from Aetna first. Just looked through my deleted email and there is nothing from them about this. Not that they were easy to work with, but a couple of cases I placed with them, noone else would touch.

  • Jim Sugden

    Aetna isn’t leaving the individual health insurance market (at least not yet). Only leaving Colorado. Is anyone in government asking,why?

    Taken in historical context, PPACA is only one more brick in the health insurance wall now built around Colorado. A wall built primarily of mandates and legislation that tells carriers “we don’t trust you and we don’t want you here”.

    Interstate sale of health insurance may be controversial but might look more appealing when we have only five, or four or three carriers left in our mandate enriched state.

  • Dorothy Marshall

    This is trueley a sad day for Colorado and all individuals looking for insurance. I can tell you several of our Aetna insured will most likely end up in Cover Coklorado.

    Aetna has now left the Colorado small group market,for the second time, and now the individual market. No wonder my large
    employers are suspicious and concerned. Two of my key accounts want me to start looking into moving ASAP. Can’t say I blame them. What a shame!!!

  • William (Jeff) Hanlin

    I am not surprised… the writing was on the wall. I, too, only have a few dozen individual policy holders with Aetna. I agree with Joel, it would have been nice to have heard this news from Aetna first. Good luck to everyone!!

  • http://www.healthinsurancecolorado.net/blog1/ Jay

    Meh. Good riddance to Aetna. I never liked dealing with them at all. My days will now have fewer messes to clean up.
    I currently have a client that was sent an invoice for $0 on 1/1/2011. Client mistakenly called the number on the invoice to ask about it before calling me. The person at Aetna told them that their policy had been canceled due to health care reform.
    Aetna actually just gave them a new policy number based on a policy with increased benefits. The errors on just that one client don’t stop there, but I don’t have time to continue with the whole story because I’m busy cleaning up those messes today.

    In my opinion, it’s not a sad day for Colorado. Quite the contrary for me.

    And I don’t think government needs to be asking too many questions about this one carrier choosing not to do business here. I’ve never understood the reasons Aetna does the things they’ve done. If one of the more competent carriers decided to leave, it might mean something.

  • Paul Ryan

    Hey all,

    Aetna is leaving CO because it can’t wrangle a competitive advantage (read: monopoly). Contrary to conventional wisdom, insurance companies can’t profit in a competition with other companies…it is in their interest to withdraw from the market in question in order to focus on creating a dominant position in a different market.

    This is the main reason why my Path to Prosperity will fail miserably as private heath insurers withdraw from markets they do not dominate, reducing competition instead of creating it. Then the remaining companies will set about increasing policy prices paid by the insured while cranking down the prices they pay to providers. Result: profit.

    Aetna figured this out a few years back under CEO John Rowe.

    See also this article to determine if you discern a pattern:
    http://www.examiner.com/health-care-in-national/aetna-withdrawing-from-the-small-group-health-insurance-market-michigan

  • http://www.healthinsurancecolorado.net/blog1/ Jay

    Ever since Aetna entered the Colorado market, I was skeptical:
    http://healthinsurance-colorado.blogspot.com/2006/09/skeptical-about-aetna.html

  • payment protection insurance

    Hey, it’s really strange to know that Atena no longer offers health insurances plans for the anyone. The regarding explanation is massively looking just unique about it. And this one truly enhances my amount of knowledge about it. Thanks for sharing.

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