Aetna is a name that some of you know, if you are insured with them, for those of you who are not too familiar with the company lets begin by taking a look at how they have chosen to describe themselves, “We believe we can help create a better health care system. This belief drives our daily decisions as one of the nation’s leading health care benefits companies. We work hard to provide our members with information and resources to help them make informed decisions about their health. Learn more about health care initiatives… We help people achieve health and financial security by providing easy access to cost-effective, high-quality health care. And we continue to be a leader in building a stronger, more effective health care system by working with doctors, hospitals, employers, patients, public officials and others.”

Sadly the company is getting ready to make a sizeable layoff action happen. The company is going to cut back on about 80 Connecticut workers. Sadly this number only qualifies as half of the larger layoffs plan for the company. The total number of job cut to the company will be about 160 when al is said and done.

Interestingly enough the company is getting ready to cut back on job cuts and in the most recent release chose to talk about the money they gave as prizes in a contest, which total more than $100,000, “Aetna (NYSE: AET) Chairman, CEO and President Mark T. Bertolini today announced the two winners of the CarePass™ Medication Reminder Developer Challenge, launched to spur development of apps that help consumers remember to take their medications. The first place winners, mHealthCoach, received a $75,000 prize for FLOR’NCE.  The second place winners, PillJogger, received a $25,000 prize for PillJogger Lite.  The two winning apps will be integrated into Aetna’s CarePass platform, which offers simple, convenient access to some of the best health and wellness apps in the marketplace.”

This ism of course, not the only jobs cuts in the field of health care to be made in recent months. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage of job cuts in health care here is a look at the recent cuts to Express Scripts, “The company is, as you may have guesses, undergoing a lot of layoffs. The company is getting ready to cut back on about 283 of its employees in order to put itself to fiscal rights. The company may or may not be making a mass layoff action happen, depending on how the layoffs are distributed… As you can image this is not the only time that Express Scripts has turned to layoffs in order to set its budget to right. For those of you who missed out on the coverage of our earlier cuts by Express Scripts here is a look at those job cuts”

For now the company has not said anything about what kind of severance benefits, if any, it plans to give to the large number of soon to be displaced workers.