When Congress created the Employment Retirement Income Security Act in 1974 (ERISA), the stated intention was to “protect…participants in employee benefit plans and their beneficiaries…by establishing standards of conduct…and by providing for appropriate remedies.” Basically, the law was supposed to make things better for people in big group health plans by demanding that they all follow the same federal rules.
While they certainly knew that ERISA regulations would cover a lot of people, they still meant for there to be plenty of non-ERISA plans. Unfortunately, the people who actually wrote the language of the law made it so vague that today practically everyone getting insurance through their employer is governed by ERISA – and the vast majority of people in our country are insured through their work. Though plans that aren’t covered by ERISA do exist, they are incredibly few and far between.