[dragonwriter]

Another thing that is happening is that some insurers are realizing that the individual plans they offered prior to the ACA (which they have to do all the work of acquisition/marketing, and whose potential client pools are limited compared to exchange-listed plans because no one is eligible for a subsidy to purchase them) are no longer competitive in the marketplace given ACA exchanges where: 1) A substantial part of the cost of marketing is subsidized by the public who provides a discovery portal, and 2) Lots of potential clients will be eligible for premium subsidies.

The net effect is that exchange-listed plans -- because of the two forms of subsidy -- have lower per member acquisition costs than traditional individual plans, meaning that for any given premium level, they can provide more profit and/or more coverage. These plans can expect to lose lots of their existing customers to exchange plans in the short-term, and its not really worth the effort to replace them -- so, for the insurer, it makes sense (especially since if they are also offering exchange listed plans) to just cancel the no-longer-viable non-exchange individual plans rather than continue to bear the fixed overhead of operating them when their sales prospects aren't good.