Health insurer Aetna reported an adjusted quarterly profit Tuesday well above initial expectations.
The major insurance provider earned $2.71 a share, smoking analysts’ initial estimates of around $2.37 a share, according to Aetna’s first-quarter results. Aetna also reported an adjusted revenue of $15.49 billion, beating initial predictions of $15.44 billion.
“This strong start to the year has enabled Aetna to absorb continued pressure from our individual commercial products,” Aetna Chief Executive Mark Bertolini said in a statement.
Aetna pulled out of 11 Obamacare exchanges in 2017 and announced in April that it would exit Iowa’s Obamacare insurance marketplace in 2018. The company offers plans on exchanges in 4 states in 2017: Delaware, Iowa, Virginia and Nebraska. It is reportedly evaluating its positions in each of the remaining states to see whether or not it is profitable to continue doing business.
Aetna is not the only insurance company leaving Obamacare exchanges. Humana announced in February that it will pull out of the Obamacare exchanges entirely in 2018. It will be the first major insurance provider to opt out of Obamacare under President Donald Trump.
The company said it tried to provide plans on exchanges for years where it could offer a “viable product.” Its decision to stop offering plans on the exchanges came after “seeing signs of an unbalanced risk pool based on the results of the 2017 open enrollment period, therefore we’ve decided that we can’t continue to offer this coverage in 2018,” Bruce Broussard, chief executive of Humana, told reporters.
Send tips to robert@dailycallernewsfoundation.org
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.