You are a fiduciary of your health plan. You probably found out just now.
Twenty years ago, sitting on your company's 401(k) committee was the most boring job in the building. You approved a fund lineup once a year, signed something, ate a bagel, went back to work. Nobody thought twice about it. The word fiduciary was legal boilerplate, the kind of thing that lived in a binder no one opened.
Then the lawsuits came. Employees started suing their own employers — not for stealing, but for not paying attention. For leaving a high-cost fund in the plan when a cheaper, identical one existed. For never checking. Juries and judges agreed. And suddenly that boring committee seat carried personal legal exposure, and every employer in America went scrambling to prove they had been prudent.
Here is the part no one is telling you.
The exact same thing is now happening to your health plan. And most of the people legally on the hook have no idea they are even sitting in the seat.
Part 01You Signed Up for This Without Reading the Fine Print
If your company self-funds its health benefits — or funds them at all under an ERISA plan — someone at your organization is a fiduciary of that plan. Usually it is whoever signs the plan documents. Often that is the CFO or the head of HR. Sometimes it is a name in a document that person doesn't even remember signing.
A fiduciary is not a job title. It is a legal standard, and it is the highest one American law imposes on anyone outside of a courtroom. It means you are required to run the plan prudently, in the sole interest of the participants, as if the money were being spent on behalf of people who are trusting you completely. Because it is, and they are.
Now ask yourself an uncomfortable question. When your health plan renewed last year with a double-digit increase, did anyone at your company actually evaluate that? Or did you shop it, save a little, sign, and move on the way you always have?
Under the fiduciary standard, "the way we always have" is not a defense. It is the whole problem.
Part 02This Was Always the Law. Everyone Just Ignored It.
Here is what surprises people. This is not new.
So why is this landing on your desk only now?
Because for four decades, the lawyers went where the money was easy to trace: retirement accounts. In the mid-2000s, one law firm figured out how to sue employers for running expensive, sloppy 401(k) plans. They won. That single crack in the wall became a flood. The cases climbed all the way to the Supreme Court in 2015, which ruled that a fiduciary has a continuing duty to monitor the plan. Not a one-time duty. A forever duty. You cannot set it and forget it.
For twenty years, that playbook has been perfected on retirement plans. Every RFP, every benchmarking report, every committee meeting with real minutes — all of it exists because employers learned the hard way what "prudent" costs when you skip it.
And now the people who wrote that playbook have finished with retirement. They have looked up, and they have noticed something.
Part 03The Lawyers Followed the Money, and the Money Moved
The American retirement market is enormous — somewhere north of ten trillion dollars. That is what fueled two decades of fee litigation.
- Retirement plans, ~$10T+ market
- Excessive-fee theory, proven in court
- Two decades of case law
- Committees, minutes, benchmarking now standard
- Health plans — a larger market still
- Same theory: you overpaid and never checked
- First suits filed against household-name employers
- Most plan sponsors have no committee and no minutes
That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the actual business logic of the plaintiffs' bar, stated plainly in their own filings. The same excessive-fee theory that worked on your 401(k) — that you pay too much, you never checked, and you had a legal duty to check — is now being aimed directly at health plans.
The first suits have already been filed against household-name employers. Some have stumbled, some are being appealed, and at least one has already survived its first real test in court in 2026. We will walk through exactly what happened in each of them later in this series, because the details matter and the headlines have oversold them in both directions.
But you do not need to wait for a verdict to understand the assignment. The retirement plan lawsuits took years to mature too. Employers who waited for the case law to settle before getting their house in order were the ones who got caught. The ones who moved early were the ones who were fine.
The question is not whether you will lose a lawsuit. The question is whether, if someone asked you today to prove you managed this plan prudently, you could hand them anything at all.
Most employers cannot. Not because they did anything wrong, but because they never knew they were supposed to keep the receipts.
Part 04How to Fix It: Four Moves, None of Them Expensive
The good news is that fiduciary risk is not fixed by spending more money. It is fixed by process. Here is where you start.
Pull your plan documents and identify who is named. If the answer is "I'm not sure," that is your first finding — and it is a serious one.
Why it matters: you cannot manage a duty you don't know you hold.
Even a small one. Two or three people who own the health plan the way your retirement committee owns the 401(k).
Why it matters: this is the single structural change that separates the employers who are protected from the ones who are exposed.
Prudence is a habit, not an event. Meet on a set cadence. Quarterly is plenty for most mid-market employers.
Why it matters: the point is that it recurs. A continuing duty requires a continuing process.
Keep minutes. Every meeting, every decision, every question you asked. We will build the full documentation file later in this series, but you can start keeping minutes this week — and you should.
Why it matters: in fiduciary law there is a brutal saying — if it isn't documented, it didn't happen.
The Takeaway
None of that requires a new vendor, a bigger budget, or a lawyer on retainer. It requires deciding to treat your health plan like the multi-million-dollar financial obligation it already is. You have been a fiduciary this whole time. The only thing that has changed is that now, everyone else knows it too.
At Hotchkiss, we help mid-market employers stand up benefits committees, document their decisions, and benchmark what they are actually paying — so that "prove you were prudent" is a question with an answer. If you are not sure who your plan's fiduciaries are, that is the conversation worth having first.
Talk to Tess— Tess
