Aetna claimed this summer that it was pulling out of all but four of the 15 states where it was providing Obamacare individual insurance because of a business decision — it was simply losing too much money on the Obamacare exchanges.
Now a federal judge has ruled that that was a rank falsehood. In fact, says Judge John D. Bates, Aetna made its decision at least partially in response to a federal antitrust lawsuit blocking its proposed $37-billion merger with Humana. Aetna threatened federal officials with the pullout before the lawsuit was filed, and followed through on its threat once it was filed. Bates made the observations in the course of a ruling he issued Monday blocking the merger.
Aetna executives had moved heaven and earth to conceal their decision-making process from the court, in part by discussing the matter on the phone rather than in emails, and by shielding what did get put in writing with the cloak of attorney-client privilege, a practice Bates found came close to "malfeasance."
Source:
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-aetna-obamacare-20170123-story.html
At what point does arbitrarily screwing with the healthcare of millions of people rise to the level of criminality?
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:49PM
It could be mostly this article is true, but with the important detail they really did back out because they were losing money.
Perhaps this happened: They just used the threat of them backing out of Obamacare as a tool in another matter. When that matter didn't go as they wanted, they claimed they were following up on that threat, but actually they were going to back out regardless and were just trying to guilt-trip the gov't or something (maybe in hopes of getting another concession out of them, or some advantage in a future disagreement, or maybe even just because they were salty). Just because they made the threat didn't mean they were serious. People tend to forget the threats you don't follow up on if you don't publicize them, which is precisely what they did, threaten someone with an action and not publicize it. It takes a lot of data to see if someone does this kind of thing routinely, because you can't count on people noticing the pattern.
Just saying this theory doesn't seem inconsistent with the provided evidence, to my understanding.