The Silent Danger: Understanding Fiduciary Risks in Self-Funded Health Plans

By Frank Pennachio

The Silent Danger: Understanding Fiduciary Risks in Self-Funded Health Plans is a groundbreaking guide for employers, CFOs, HR executives, plan fiduciaries, and consultants running or advising self-funded health plans. It reveals the hidden, often unseen risks that can financially ruin companies, reputations, and leaders' personal lives and provides a straightforward map to manage those risks confidently.

Self-funded health plans offer potential cost savings and flexibility but are accompanied by latent fiduciary, regulatory, and operational risks that many employers--and sometimes their advisors--fail to understand. Inadequate stop-loss arrangements, insufficient cybersecurity, poorly written plan documents, vendor conflicts of interest, and fiduciary violations can quietly add to catastrophic liabilities. In today's regulatory environment, where Department of Labor audits are increasing and plaintiffs' attorneys are more active, ignorance is no shield.

With decades of fiduciary advisory experience, the author takes apart the nuances of self-funding in a straightforward, authoritative style. He puts an end to ERISA application mystery to health plans, explains why fiduciary rules are more stringent than ever, and identifies how sponsors of plans can become personally liable for mistakes, even ones they unknowingly made. Through court cases, actual applications, and most frequent pitfalls, The Silent Danger reveals the peril hidden inside self-funded plans.

Along with warning readers of dangers, this book enables readers to take back control. Reasonable models for selecting and monitoring third-party administrators, pharmacy benefit managers, and stop-loss carriers; constructing compliant plan documents; meeting cybersecurity demands; preparing for DOL audits; and designing fiduciary governance structures that will not collapse are addressed. Extensive appendices offer required checklists and due diligence tools that can be used instantaneously.

Covered subject matter includes:
-How self-funded health plans work--and where misconception means catastrophe.
-Why fiduciary responsibilities under ERISA expose employers to grave personal harm.
-Level-funded plans exposed: What's happening and why they are frequently misrepresented.
-PBM contract, stop-loss, and TPA agreement sneaky traps.
-Fiduciaries are called upon by cybersecurity to play an active management role.
-Surviving and thriving through a Department of Labor audit.
-The essential role actuaries and financial forecasting play in plan risk management.
-Practical steps to build a fiduciary excellence culture and protect organizational and personal assets.

Unlike other insurance forums focusing on the plan's cost and network benefits, The Silent Danger examines the inner structure, cash, and legal underpinnings of health plans, where real exposures exist. It encourages employers to consider not as "benefits buyers," but as "plan fiduciaries," that victory with self-funding does not depend on chasing lower premiums but on setting the highest levels of quality standards of care, transparency, and compliance.

This is not a scare-off manual aimed at scaring employers away from self-funding. Instead, it equips them to assess the risks and self-fund responsibly, with the information and procedures they need to protect their organizations, employees, and themselves.

Whether you are an old hand at fiduciary work, a new plan sponsor, a consultant counseling a client, or a CFO who oversees health benefits risk, The Silent Danger is a must-read. It provides insight, models, and tools that enable you to transform hidden risks into visible benefits and transform health plan management from a silent risk to a strategic asset.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FD194WFP
• ISBN13: 9798317804718
• Release Date: August 2025
• Publisher: Bookbaby
• Length: 288 Pages