The Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan carrier inMaryland is pulling out of the state's 2017 individual majormedical insurance market.

Related: Another PPACA co-op goes down

Baltimore-based Evergreen Health Inc. announced the move with abanner on its website home page last week.

The individual major medical coverage now in force will stay inforce until the end of the year, but affected consumers shouldchoose a new plan by Dec. 15, the company says inan individual coverage explanation linked to thebanner.

The Maryland Insurance Administration says it will protectEvergreen Health individual coverage holders against a gap incoverage by automatically shifting holders who fail to choose a newplan into replacement coverage.

The Evergreen Health individual market withdrawal will affectabout 6,000 holders of the company's individual and familycoverage, officials say in a set of answers for consumers. About 4,000 couldbe auto-renewed into coverage from a local affiliate of Oakland,California-based Kaiser Permanente, and about 2,000 could end upwith coverage from a unit of Owings Mills, Maryland-based CareFirstInc.

Evergreen Health group health coverage will stay in effect untilthe policy renewal date, officials say in a separate announcement.

The organizers of Evergreen Health started the carrier withloans from the Affordable Care Act CO-OP program. The ACAdrafters created the program in an effort to use federal loans toencourage community groups to start member-owned, nonprofit healthplans, to increase the level of competition in the individual andsmall-group health insurance markets.

Related: Why do people buy individual plans outside of theACA marketplace?

CO-OP organizers have had to cope with big cuts in federal CO-OPfunding, sudden changes in ACA programs that were supposed tobuffer health insurers against problems with new ACA rules andprograms, and CO-OP rules that keep CO-OPs from using any businessvalue they build up as loan collateral. Only a handful of the 23CO-OPs that came to life in January 2014 are still in business.

Managers of Evergreen Health told Maryland news organizations inOctober that they were hoping to overcome the problems with theCO-OP system by getting permission from the federal Centers forMedicare & Medicaid Services to convert the company to afor-profit charter.

Dr. Peter Beilenson, the company's chief executive officer, saidlast week in a statement that the proposed conversion is movingforward.

"We have a very strong group of investors and are workingclosely with federal and state regulators to craft a deal that willclose sometime in the first half of 2017," Beilenson said in thestatement. "Right now, we continue to sell to small and largegroups. When the conversion is done, Evergreen will be in a muchstronger financial position than we have ever been in and, as aresult, even better able than before to produce the high-quality,affordable services that our members have come to expect fromus."

Maryland officials and Evergreen Health have not publicly talkedabout how the shift of consumers who fail to actively choose newcoverage into new plans will affect any agents or brokers who havehelped consumers sign up for Evergreen Health coverage. Officialsare encouraging consumers to seek help with getting replacementcoverage from insurance brokers or consumer assistanceorganizations.