House Dems urge Trump administration to act on health insurance claim denials

Two leading Democrats on a House panel called on the head of the Labor Department agency that protects workers’ benefits to take action on improper health insurance claim denials. The Tuesday letter was provided exclusively to States Newsroom.

Reps. Bobby Scott of Virginia and Mark DeSaulnier of California — the ranking members of the House Committee on Education and Workforce and its Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, respectively — offered three recommendations to Daniel Aronowitz, assistant secretary of the DOL’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, or EBSA.

“Improper claim denials impose substantial health and financial hardships on individuals, leading to delays in necessary treatments, worsened health outcomes and high out-of-pocket costs,” Scott and DeSaulnier wrote. “In far too many tragic cases, denials lead to the unnecessary deaths of people who have earned benefits through their plan but are nonetheless denied the care that could have saved their lives.”

Improvements called for in collecting data on denials

As head of EBSA, Aronowitz is responsible for administering, regulating and enforcing Title I of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, which is intended to protect participants’ and beneficiaries’ interests in employer-sponsored benefit plans.

The Labor Department estimated that roughly 136 million participants and beneficiaries were covered by approximately 2.6 million ERISA-covered group health plans in 2022.

Scott and DeSaulnier called on Aronowitz to “implement long-delayed transparency requirements to collect data on health claim denials by insurance companies and group health plans.” They suggested building on Form 5500, ERISA’s annual reporting requirement, to “improve data collection from group health plans.”

Staffing at agency, Trump budget cuts cited

The lawmakers also urged Aronowitz to “commit to fully enforcing the law and to ensuring that EBSA is adequately staffed to fulfill its mission,” pointing to a decline of more than a fifth of the agency’s staff under President Donald Trump’s administration.

Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget request for DOL included $181 million for EBSA, a $10 million cut from the prior year. The Senate Appropriations Committee passed its bill to fund DOL, including EBSA, in July and maintained funding at $191 million for fiscal 2026. The corresponding House panel approved a bill in September that aligned with the administration’s proposed $10 million cut.

The Democrats also recommended that Aronowitz take steps to “improve consumers’ ability to appeal wrongfully denied health benefits.” They encouraged him to consult the Advisory Council on Employee Welfare and Pension Benefit Plans and to “reverse” DOL’s current posture regarding the council.

Scott and DeSaulnier noted that DOL had taken several steps to “undermine” the council, including “delaying public release of its report, purging documents such as testimonies from consumer advocates from the department’s website, and, to date, failing to convene the council for any of the four statutorily mandated meetings.”

The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.