It’s always nice to see companies fighting back against the Feds. Aetna’s got some guts and some ammo doing this, because the government is going to go after them hard now, looking for all kinds of regulations that it “violates”. Aetna is threatening to drop out of Obamacare, which is already reeling from other major pullouts. Soon there will be no insurers left.

It is basically telling the Justice Department to leave it alone in its business plans to merge with Humana, which needs to be done to save the companies after Obamacare is draining the entire system by subsidizing high cost patients with money that doesn’t exist because younger people aren’t signing up, amazingly.

The Justice Department is in charge of deciding which mergers are a “trust” and which are fine, which they do totally arbitrarily because there is no objective definition of what a “trust” is. From the letter written by Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna, to some guy named Ryan, an antitrust lawyer working for The Man:

Our analysis to date makes clear that if the deal were challenged and/or blocked we would need to take immediate actions to mitigate public exchange and ACA small group losses. Specifically, if the DOJ sues to enjoin the transaction, we will immediately take action to reduce our 2017 exchange footprint…

Unfortunately, a challenge by the DOJ to that acquisition and/or the DOJ successfully blocking the transaction would have a negative financial impact on Aetna and would impair Aetna’s ability to continue its support, leaving Aetna with no choice but to take actions to steward its financial health. These contemplated actions would include the actions discussed below.

Although we remain supportive of the Administration’s efforts to expand coverage, we must also face market realities. Our customers expect us to keep their insurance products affordable and continually improving, and our shareholders expect that we will generate a market return on invested capital for them. We have been operating on the public exchanges since the beginning of 2014 at a substantial loss…

Finally, based on our analysis to date, we believe it is very likely that we would need to leave the public exchange business entirely and plan for additional business efficiencies should our deal ultimately be blocked.