An employer's fight to understand what it is spending on its workers' healthcare just encountered a legal hitch.
A federal judge in Alabama ruled Tuesday that a landmark $2.7 billion Blue Cross and Blue Shield antitrust settlement means supply chain company Owens & Minor cannot sue Elevance Health over a program involving its employees' claims data.
Related: Judge approves Blue Cross Blue Shield $2.67B antitrust settlement
As part of the deal, Blues companies agreed in 2020 to pay individual policyholders and employers $2.7 billion. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association also lifted rules capping how much revenue insurers could generate from non-Blues branded businesses, cut restrictions on where insurers could sell policies and opened up bidding for large employer customers.
By participating in the sprawling antitrust deal, Owens & Minor agreed not to sue Blues companies over the national BlueCard Program, their system for reimbursing out-of-network providers, wrote Judge R. David Proctor, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, in a memorandum opinion.
In 2023, the employer sued, alleging Elevance subsidiary Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Virginia violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 by refusing to disclose its employees’ claims data. The settlement requires Owens & Minor to either amend the lawsuit to remove the claims regarding the BlueCard Program or drop it, Proctor wrote.
Elevance and Owens & Minor did not immediately respond to interview requests.
The case represents part of a growing trend of self-funded companies suing health insurers to gain access to what their employees' healthcare really costs. Employers started suing insurers after a federal law change required companies to affirm they acted as good stewards of their workers' health benefits.
Some also participated in the Blue Cross settlement: In 2022, for example, unions representing bricklayers and other laborers in Connecticut sued Elevance Health in federal court, alleging the insurer blocked the unions from obtaining their own claims data. The unions, Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 1 Fund and the Sheet Metal Workers Local 40 Fund, opted in to the Blue Cross antitrust deal in 2020, according to a website maintained by the settlement plaintiffs' lawyers. The ongoing case, however, does not involve the BlueCard Program.
