The Employee Benefits Security Administration — a division of the U.S. Department of Labor — says an effort by a group of Idaho farmers to team up to buy health insurance look good.
The Idaho Farm Bureau Federation asked EBSA to assess a health coverage purchasing strategy it has proposed for its 10,770 members.
The federation wants to form an Idaho Farm Bureau Federal Health Plan that would buy fully insured health coverage for the farm owners, their dependents and their employees from Blue Cross of Idaho.
The participate, a farmer must employ at least two full-time employees and sign a participation agreement.
Jeffrey Turner, director of the EBSA Office of Regulations and Interpretations, gave the proposal a positive review in an advisory opinion letter posted Friday.
Because the farmers work together often and have many characteristics in common, they qualify as members of a "group or association of employers" that can create an "employee welfare benefit plan," Turner wrote.
The plan would be a "multiple employer welfare plan," Turner said.
The letter appears to be the first of its kind that EBSA issued since Donald Trump returned to the White House.
EBSA issued one similar letter to an Independent Colleges of Indiana's benefits consortium in 2024, while Joe Biden, was president, and it issued many similar letters to employer health purchasing groups in the past, such as one it sent to the Dairy Consortium Health Plan of Minnesota in 2017.
An EBSA advisory opinion simply expresses the DOL view of how DOL rules apply to a given set of facts. A group purchasing program organizer may also want to get approvals from the Internal Revenue Service and other entities.
What it means: Although EBSA did issue on similar advisory opinion letter during the Biden administration, the new letter appears to be part of a new EBSA effort to ramp up production of advisory opinions.
DOL officials are preparing to talk about the new advisor opinion effort Wednesday during a DOL online forum.
The backdrop: Efforts by farm bureaus to create health coverage purchasing coalitions are part of the same stream of thinking that led to the association health plan movement.
Critics of group purchasing coalitions worry the coalitions could hurt the market for conventional fully insured health coverage.
Supporters argue that encouraging employers to team up to buy health coverage through carefully structured coalitions will help them get the same kind of affordable, high-quality coverage that large self-insured employers get.
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