Sure, it was very a convenient letter. The entire thing reads like a business negotiation -- Aetna knows the DOJ wants it to remain in the exchanges, and Aetna is basically saying you can't have what you want unless we also get what we want. I just don't think it should be a negotiable point.
IMO, the government needs to either force the private insurers to participate (through, for instance, denying them access to Medicare/Medicaid patients if they pull out), or we need a public option. I don't see a different way forward. I prefer the former method, but other countries have merged public and private health care successfully. The German model, for instance, offers both public and private insurance. Private insurance is better, but more expensive. The interesting thing they do is make it incredibly expensive to switch between the two in order to keep people in the same system from their 20s to their 90s. That actually levels the risk pool quite a bit -- otherwise young people would join the cheaper public option and jump to private insurance when they're older. The result is a good enough mixture of young and old people in both systems to keep prices reasonable.
