Aetna announced Monday that due to grave financial losses, it will dramatically slash its participation in public insurance marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act. In 2017, Aetna will only offer insurance policies in 242 counties scattered across four states—that’s a nearly 70-percent decrease from its 2016 offerings in 778 counties across 15 states.

The deep cuts have largely been seen as a blow to the sustainability of the healthcare law, which has seen other big insurers also pull out, namely UnitedHealth group and Humana. But the explanation that Aetna was forced to scale back due to heavy profit cuts doesn’t square with previous statements by the company.

In April, Mark Bertolini, the chairman and chief executive of Aetna, told investors that the insurance giant anticipated losses and could weather them, even calling participation in the marketplaces during the rocky first years “a good investment.” And in a July 5 letter (PDF) to the Department of Justice, obtained by the Huffington Post by a Freedom of Information Act request, Bertolini explicitly threatened that Aetna would back out of the marketplace if the department tried to block its planned $37 billion merger with Humana.

“Specifically, if the DOJ sues to enjoin the transaction, we will immediately take action to reduce our 2017 exchange footprint .... [I]nstead of expanding to 20 states next year, we would reduce our presence to no more than 10 states…” Bertolini wrote.

Sixteen days after the letter was penned, the DOJ moved to block the merger. In announcing the department’s decision to file suit, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said it “would leave much of the multitrillion health insurance industry in the hands of just three mammoth companies, restricting competition in key markets.”

In interviews this week, Bertolini has brushed off the tie between marketplace participation and the merger deal, reiterating that the cuts were all based on finances. “As a strong supporter of public exchanges as a means to meet the needs of the uninsured, we regret having to make this decision,” Bertolini told The New York Times. He noted that the company faced “a second-quarter pretax loss of $200 million and total pretax losses of more than $430 million since January 2014 in our individual products.”

But Obama allies weren't buying the explanation. In a Facebook post, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), noted that Aetna has the right to fight the DOJ on the merger. But, she said, “the health of the American people should not be used as bargaining chips to force the government to bend to one giant company’s will.”