To be sure, the mechanisms eventually created for enforcement of the parity law were never very rigorous. (Some view this laxity as the Obama administration’s thank you to the insurance industry for supporting passage of Affordable Care Act.) Oversight ultimately landed with the Employee Benefits Security Administration, an already stretched-thin agency within the Department of Labor. Describing the challenges in a report to Congress in 2018, Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta wrote that there are about 400 investigators and 100 benefit advisors trying to oversee more than 5 million health, pension and other employee benefit plans. The EBSA also turned out to be toothless: It can’t assess civil monetary penalties — not even in “egregious cases of noncompliance to deter bad actors,” Acosta told Congress.

Source: Los Angeles Times March 12, 2019 10:07 UTC