Washington, D.C., May 17, 2024 – The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) recently filed public comments on proposed regulations issued by the Indiana Department of Insurance. This proposed rule seeks to implement legislative changes to the state’s All Payer Claims Database (APCD). ERIC’s comments alerted the Department that the proposed rule violates the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”) and would likely trigger a lawsuit if advanced in its current form.
The Proposed Rule would explicitly place substantial recordkeeping and reporting requirements on self-insured ERISA plans, which is in direct conflict with federal law and legal precedent established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Gobeille v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 577 U.S. 312 (2016). In that landmark case, the Supreme Court struck down a nearly identical Vermont law requiring self-insured ERISA plans to report to the state’s APCD, because it had an impermissible “connection with” ERISA plans, attempting to govern and interfere with the uniformity of plan administration.
ERIC filed an amicus brief in Gobeille urging the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm ERISA preemption and strike down the Vermont law at issue, which the Court’s subsequent ruling did.
“ERIC member companies offer benefits to tens of millions of employees and their families, located in every state and city across the nation. Their ability to continue to deliver those benefits while also improving health care affordability, efficiency, and cost transparency is rooted in the uniformity Congress envisioned when it passed ERISA nearly 50 years ago,” said Dillon Clair, Director of State Advocacy, ERIC. “State-specific reporting laws applied to self-insured plans, like those pursued in Vermont and Indiana, threaten to erode the uniformity that ERISA provides, create costly and confusing regulatory patchworks, and undermine the benefits offered by the employer-sponsored health care system.”
Clair concluded, “The Department has a clear opportunity to avoid these conflicts by changing the Proposed Rule so that it will not apply to self-insured ERISA plans.”