It was just four days ago that Bright Healthcare, which had been aggressively expanding their individual market coverage area footprint as recently as a year ago, suddenly announced that they were doing a complete 180 and instead pulling out of virtually the entire individual & small group markets nationally starting in January 2023.

This shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as people thought, however; Bright had already announced back in April of this year that they were pulling out of five states, and healthcare analyst Ari Gottlieb had written an impressively-researched post about the warning signs surrounding Bright’s plight back in August, which I expanded upon here at the time.

In any event, Tuesday’s announcement by Bright that they were pulling out the other nine states they’re currently operating in means that nearly a million ACA individual market enrollees will either be automatically shifted to different insurance policies via different carriers or they’ll have to log into their accounts and actively pick a different policy themselves. This represents upwards of 8% of all on-exchange individual market enrollees nationally, including an estimated ~262,000 in Texas alone.