EP 552 When Brokers Become ERISA Targets - with Ron Peck

The next big lawsuit headline in employee benefits may not name the employer first. It may name the broker.We sit down with Ron Peck, Chief Legal Officer at The PHIA Group, to make sense of rising ERISA fiduciary liability pressure on self-funded health plans and the advisors who support them. The twist Ron keeps coming back to is that the legal “ingredients” have been around for years, from retirement plan cases to suits targeting TPAs and other service providers. What’s changing is the target list, plus the creativity of plaintiffs’ firms applying an established ERISA playbook to health plan cost drivers and vendor relationships.We get practical about what actually creates fiduciary status: discretion, control, and decision-making power over plan assets or administration. A disclaimer in a contract helps only if our behavior matches it. That leads to concrete safeguards brokers can use immediately, like documenting options, clarifying who makes the final call, and keeping our own records so a client can’t later say “my broker made all the decisions.” From there, we connect fiduciary duty to cost containment basics that often get ignored, including subrogation and other recovery programs where leaving money on the table can look like a failure to follow plan terms and a failure of prudent asset management.Finally, we zoom out to what’s next: PBM transparency pressure, out-of-network claims governance, and an emerging No Surprises Act risk where plans pay through the federal process when the claim never qualified. If you advise employer-sponsored health plans, this conversation is a must-listen for staying valuable without accidentally becoming the decision-maker. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the biggest fiduciary risk you think advisors are underestimating.