Humana to Drop Out of Obamacare Exchanges in 2018

The health insurance giant Humana will exit the Obamacare exchanges in 2018.

Humana believes the Obamacare exchanges have too few healthy patients to balance out a significant number of sick and costly patients. The health insurer lowered its Obamacare participation previously, reducing the number of states in 2016 from 19 to 11.

Donald Trump tweeted about Humana’s exit saying:

Obamacare continues to fail. Humana to pull out in 2018. Will repeal, replace & save healthcare for ALL Americans. https://t.co/glWEQ0lNR4

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2017

Humana’s coverage dropped significantly among Obamacare exchanges in early 2017. Only 152,000 customers purchased health care in January 2017, down from 404,000 in December. In December Humana announced that they would be writing off $583 million as a result of its failed exchange insurance program.

Humana said in its announcement, “All of these actions were taken with the expectation that the company’s Individual Commercial business would stabilize to the point where the company could continue to participate in the program. However, based on its initial analysis of data associated with the company’s healthcare exchange membership following the 2017 open enrollment period, Humana is seeing further signs of an unbalanced risk pool.”

Humana’s loss primarily results from the Obamacare exchanges’ lopsided ratio of mostly sick patients to healthy ones. The Obamacare exchanges need a larger amount of healthy customers to keep the exchanges profitable. Humana plans to serve Obamacare customers until the end of 2017.