Obamacare, saying good bye

LA Times: Healthcare experts have been warning that Republican dithering on a replacement for the Affordable Care Act would be a further discouragement for participating insurance companies.Now, the first shoe has dropped: Aetna, which sharply reduced its ACA footprint this year, is signaling that it will be entirely out of the market in 2018. Mark Bertolini, Aetna’s chairman and chief executive, put it bluntly during a conference call Tuesday with investment analysts: “We have no intention of being in the market for 2018,” he said. He cited “the unclear nature of where regulation’s headed.”That lack of clarity, he said, means that Aetna won’t know what the individual market looks like until 2019. “If you look at the notion of policy development, legislative language and then regulation,” he said on CNBC, “the nearest time we could have a completely new program is 1/1/2019.”