On April 23, 2026, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) announced settlements with four health entities following investigations into ransomware breaches that exposed unsecured electronic protected health information (“ePHI”). While ransomware enforcement actions are not new, one of the four settlements stands out as a landmark: for
Artificial intelligence (“AI”) tools are increasingly being deployed across the employee benefits landscape: from claims administration and customer service to investment analysis and participant engagement. While these technologies promise efficiency and cost savings, recent litigation and regulatory activity underscore that the use of AI in benefits administration carries meaningful legal and fiduciary risk. Below we
The Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Treasury (Departments) recently released the Federal Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR) public use files (PUF) and supplemental tables for the third and fourth quarters of 2025, and the numbers should get the attention of every plan sponsor and fiduciary overseeing a self-insured group health plan. The
In less than three months, two federal courts of appeals have held that ERISA’s actuarial-equivalence requirement mandates reasonable actuarial assumptions, rather than assumptions that simply produce mathematically equivalent optional forms of benefits to the default form of payment. In Reichert v. Kellogg Co., decided March 16, 2026, the Sixth Circuit reversed dismissals of actions