Department of Labor releases Affordable Care Act study on self-insured plans

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Labor today transmitted to Congress the first annual report on self-insured employee health benefit plans. The report, which was mandated by the Affordable Care Act, contains general information on self-insured employee health benefit plans and financial information on the employers that sponsor them.

Self-insured plans, unlike fully insured plans, are generally plans in which the sponsor retains the risk associated with paying covered health expenses, rather than paying a premium and transferring the risk to an insurance company. Some sponsors retain the risk for a subset of the benefits, but transfer the risk for the remaining benefits to health insurers – that is, they finance the plans' benefits using a mixture of self-insurance and insurance. Self-insurance is more common among larger sponsors, mainly because the health expenses of larger groups are more predictable and therefore larger sponsors face less risk.

The report includes information on self-insured and mixed health benefit plans that are required to file a Form 5500 Annual Return/Report of Employee Benefit Plan. The department estimates that 12,000 health plans filing a Form 5500 for 2008 were self-insured and 5,000 mixed self-insurance with insurance. These plans respectively covered 22 million and 25 million participants. Many self-insured health plans do not meet the filing requirements and therefore do not file the Form 5500. Therefore, it is likely that the report underestimates the total number of self-insured plans.

Health benefit plans covering private-sector employees must file a Form 5500 if they cover 100 or more participants or hold assets in trust. This report presents data on such plans for 2008, the latest year for which complete data are available.

The full report can be found on the department's Employee Benefits Security Administration Affordable Care Act page, or at http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/healthreform/index.html#5.

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