Policy Priorities

ERIC’s policy agenda is focused on improving employee wellbeing and financial security; increasing flexibility and opportunity; reducing costs and administrative burdens; and helping large employers continue to deliver uniform benefits. ERIC advocates for measures that ensure continued tax preferences for employer-sponsored benefits and exclusive federal regulation of nationwide benefits plans through ERISA preemption.

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Protecting ERISA and Working to Ensure National Uniformity

Large employers operating in multiple states need the consistency and certainty provided by ERISA to ensure that they can offer uniform, national benefits to their employees, families, and retirees. ERISA protects employers from state mandates by keeping regulation at the federal level so that benefits plans can be administered fairly and uniformly across the country. And ERISA provides employer plan sponsors with the flexibility and autonomy to create the right benefits plans for their workforce.

ERIC lobbies to preserve and reinforce ERISA preemption and defend plan sponsors’ ability to design benefits that drive value. And we oppose any state attempt to mandate reporting or other obligations on companies that offer federally regulated plans.

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Prevent or eliminate policies that violate ERISA.
Protect employers from burdensome state administrative requirements.
Prevent costly new mandates on ERISA plans.
Address the patchwork of paid leave programs.

Health Care: Challenges and Priorities

Challenge – Markets

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Implement transparency in health care markets.
Balance health care treatments, products, and care innovations with market competition.
Create an environment that encourages “smart shopping” by patients.
Align health care regulation with other sectors of the economy.
Ensure health care markets are competitive.

Health Care: Challenges and Priorities

Challenge – Costs

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Improve employer flexibility and reduce administrative burdens.
Promote digital health and innovation to increase access to care.
Expand wellness and other preventive care.
Implement coordinated care and end “care silos.”
Reform the payment system to incentivize value.

Retirement and Compensation: Challenges and Priorities

Challenge – Implementing SECURE 2.0 and Avoiding Overregulation

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Provide employers procedural certainty regarding the provisions permitting employers to make retirement plan matching contributions for workers as if their student loan payments were salary reduction contributions, and permitting employers to create emergency savings “side car” accounts.
Simplify reporting and disclosure requirements by shaping regulatory provisions to eliminate redundant and unnecessary disclosures and reducing complexity.
Minimize the complexity of the new catch-up rules.
Clarify the recoupment and self-correction rules.
Establish a workable Retirement Savings Lost and Found.
Clarify that the new automatic enrollment mandate does not apply to existing plans.
Ensure the law works as intended.
Expand safe harbor plan designs.

Retirement and Compensation: Challenges and Priorities

Challenge – Improving Flexibility, Reducing Costs and Administrative Burdens

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Ensure efficient regulatory enforcement.
Disincentivize frivolous class-action lawsuits.
Affirm the responsibility to optimize financial outcomes for plan participants.
Avoid overregulating new technologies.
Prevent burdensome new administrative requirements.
Refrain from imposing fiduciary requirements on investments available through a brokerage window.
Restore electronic disclosure as an option for default distribution.
Expand cafeteria plans to allow participants additional pre-tax benefit options such as student loan repayment, disability insurance, long-term care insurance, longevity insurance, and retirement planning services.

Retirement and Compensation: Flexibility

Challenge – Supporting and Enhancing Defined Benefit Plans

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Stop unnecessary and harmful PBGC premium increases.
Strengthen retirement security by giving overfunded plans flexibility to provide enhanced benefits.
Responsibly modernize multiemployer plans.