What Happens if UnitedHealth Pulls Out

In late 2015, amid a series of closures of relatively small co-op health plans, the nation’s largest private insurer, UnitedHealth Group, announced that it too expected losses in its Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace business and would reconsider its participation in the Marketplaces in the first half of 2016.  Most recently, there have been media reports that UnitedHealthcare (a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group) would no longer participate in the Arkansas, Georgia, and Michigan exchange markets starting in 2017.  Though United is a large, established insurer in the employer-based insurance market, it has been cautious about entering the ACA marketplaces, only participating in a handful of states in 2014 before expanding its reach in 2015 and 2016.