Cigna to pull out of individual health market, affecting thousands in Colorado

Another firm is withdrawing from the individual health insurance market, including for Colorado, effective Jan. 1, 2027.

The move by Cigna Healthcare is part of the company's overall plan to withdraw entirely from the Affordable Care Act market. It will impact individual health plans for 369,000 members in 11 states, according to a company announcement on April 30.

In Colorado, Cigna provides individual health insurance to 40,853 members, according to the the state's insurance office.

Cigna joins five other insurers that have pulled out of Colorado since 2022. That doesn't include two insurers that announced they were withdrawing from the individual market last year but rescinded that announcement two months later.

The withdrawals began with Oscar Health, which announced in May 2022 it would end its participation in the individual market in Arkansas and Colorado.

Then in October 2022, Bright Health announced it, too, was withdrawing its individual health insurance plans nationwide. Days later, Humana told its Colorado brokers and agents it was pulling out of the small group market in Colorado.

In July 2023, the Colorado Division of Insurance announced it was terminating the health plans for Friday Health and, along with several other states, petitioned the courts to liquidate the company. Most of the 30,000 Coloradans enrolled in Friday's HMO were in the individual market.

Rocky Mountain HMO and Anthem both announced their withdrawal from Colorado's individual health insurance market in 2025 but rescinded their decision in October, two months after the Colorado General Assembly adopted legislation to spend $100 million to help reduce rising premiums in the individual market.

Also in 2025, Aetna, owned by CVS Health, withdrew from the small group market; it had stopped offering health insurance in the individual market in Colorado several years earlier, according to the Division of Insurance.

With Cigna leaving Colorado, that leaves six insurers covering the individual market: HMO Colorado (Anthem); Colorado Access, which will begin offering plans on the individual market for the first time in 2027; Denver Health Medical Plan'; Kaiser Foundation Health Plan; Rocky Mountain HMO; and Select Health.

Cigna is the largest plan to pull out of Colorado in the last four years, signaling instability in the individual market.

Mike Shinbein, an executive compensation consultant, wrote on LinkedIn in April that "this is exactly the kind of disruption that most employees never have to think about, because their employer handles it. For the self-employed, independent contractors, and gig workers who rely on the individual market, this is just life."

It's getting harder, Shinbein added.

"Aetna exited the individual market entirely at the end of 2025, affecting about 1 million enrollees. Now Cigna is following. The individual insurance market is becoming less stable, not more, at exactly the moment when more Americans are working independently and depending on it," he wrote.

In a statement to Colorado Politics, Division of Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway confirmed that Cigna will no longer offer plans in the individual health insurance market nationwide.

"We continuously warned that the failure of the federal government to extend tax credits would have huge market disruptions and sadly our warnings are coming true," he said.

"Colorado continues to have a competitive individual health insurance marketplace, with two new carriers joining over the last couple of years. That being said, restoring the enhanced premium tax credits is the best way to keep costs affordable for all Americans, and to make the national market more predictable for insurers," he said.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress had adopted the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which, among other provisions, temporarily expanded eligibility for the premium tax credits for tax years 2021 and 2022.

Notably, the law eliminated the income limit of 400% of the federal poverty level, thereby allowing more Americans to quality, and provided larger subsidies compared to the original Affordable Care Act.

The Biden administration and Congress then extended these enhanced tax credits in the 2022 Budget Reconciliation Law for another three years and established the sunset date of Jan. 1, 2026.

Supporters of extending the enhanced subsidies have argued that letting them expire would mean millions of Americans would lose health coverage, while critics said they were meant to be temporary and that continuing them would subsidize higher-income earners at a significant cost to taxpayers.

On Oct. 1, Democrats in the U.S. Senate blocked a continuing resolution to fund the government because the Republican appropriations bill did not include the enhanced "Obamacare" subsidies' extension. This triggered the longest shutdown in American history, lasting 43 days.

A bipartisan deal to end the shutdown was reached, but with no guarantee that Congress would renew the expiring tax credits.