THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Aetna to cut back 70 pct on Obamacare plans in 2017.

“As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision,” Marc Bertolini, Aetna chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

The insurance giant says it will offer ACA exchange plans in Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska and Virginia, slashing its Obamacare footprint by 70 percent next year. It will offer ACA plans in just 242 counties, nationally, down from nearly 780 this year.

Aetna’s announcement comes two weeks after the company booked $200 million in ACA-related pre-tax losses in its Q2 earnings report and nearly one month after the Department of Justice’s anti-trust division sued to block the health insurer’s acquisition of rival Humana.

Humana has also announced it will cut back sharply from the exchanges. Their pullback, in the wake of UnitedHealth’s departure from all but a handful of exchanges, means that hundreds of thousands of Obamacare plan members will no longer have access to plans from the nation’s three major insurers in 2017.

Customers “taxed” into buying insurance they can’t afford to use from insurers who can’t afford to sell it is a recipe for government-mandated failure.

Free markets will take the blame.