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Trump Administration Reconsiders 2024 Final Parity Rule

The U.S. Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury Departments (the Departments) will reconsider the Biden administration’s final parity rule released in September 2024 and may issue a new rule that could modify or rescind the existing one, according to court filings this week.

On this past Monday, May 12, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the Departments’ motion to hold in abeyance ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) vs. HHS et al—the parity litigation that ERIC filed in January 2025 to challenge last year’s final parity rule.

According to the Department’s May 9, 2025 motion, the Departments had informed ERIC that “they intend to reconsider the 2024 Rule at issue in this litigation, including whether to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking rescinding or modifying the regulation.”

Meanwhile, the Departments are preparing to issue a non-enforcement policy that will apply to portions of the final regulations that are effective beginning in January 2025 and in January 2026. Until the non-enforcement policy is established, the parity rule remains in effect.

NABH anticipates the non-enforcement policy will focus on items that the lawsuit claimed are statutory authority overreaches in the rule and/or unduly burdensome, including the meaningful benefits requirement, the material differences in access standard, and the requirement for a fiduciary certification of the parity compliance self-analyses required by parity regulations.

Now the three Departments will reconsider the group health plans’ requirements related to nonquantitative treatment limitations (NQTLs). NQTLs include important elements of parity compliance, including network adequacy and prior authorization.

NABH and our partners strongly support last September’s final rule, which reflects major progress toward enforcing the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 fully and fairly.

Following the final parity rule’s release last September – and in line with their earlier parity pushback – many health plan sponsors claimed the final rule’s provisions were too complex to implement, including elements viewed as overly subjective to interpretation, as well as opposing provisions viewed as exceeding requirements in federal parity law.

The Departments’ motion to hold this case in abeyance generally aligns with the presidential memo released last month that directed the heads of all executive departments and agencies to identify certain categories of unlawful and potentially unlawful regulations.