NEWS

Bill headed to Senate would provide ‘safety blanket’ for benefit plans

Nearly half of all employees are covered by a self-insured group health plan. Many companies that offer these plans have separate stop-loss insurance policies to protect them against the risk of catastrophically high claims. Some states and the Obama administration have attempted to regulate stop-loss insurance; a move the Self-Insurance Institute of America says would render it unaffordable.

To provide more certainty in the marketplace, the SIIA — a Simpsonville, S.C.-based member-based association — worked to introduce the Self-Insurance Protection Act.\r\n\r\nThe bill on April 5 passed the House of Representatives in a 400 to 16 vote and is now expected to be introduced in the Senate in the next few weeks. EBA spoke with SIIA’s CEO, Mike Ferguson, to understand more about the legislation. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.\r\n\r\nEBA: What is the background on this bill?\r\n\r\nMike Ferguson: Shortly after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, there were policymakers within the Obama administration that became concerned that the growth of the self-funded market was coming at the expense of the public exchanges. The analysis was that the self-funding market is growing and the employers in the self-funding market are scooping up the good risks — their employees — and leaving the bad risks to go into the exchanges, which would create structural problems for the exchanges.\r\n\r\nThey further believed that the self-funded market was growing artificially, characterizing their analysis, facilitated by stop-loss insurance with relatively low attachment points. They believed that many of these self-funding plans were trying to look for an escape hatch out of the ACA requirements.\r\n\r\nReally, these were fully-insured arrangements and they should be treated and defined as such for purposes of the ACA. There was discussion within the administration and a formal request for information was issued by HHS and DOL, which asked very pointed questions about self-funded insurance and stop-loss insurance. It was clear from the line of questioning that regulators were looking to try to show that employers were moving in this direction as a way to game the system and get out of the ACA mandates.\r\n\r\nSubsequent to that, we learned there was discussion within the Obama administration on, ‘What do we do about this and how [do we] get our arms around these self-funded plans,’ because the ACA did not provide any particular recourse.