Reliance Owes Covid Disability Pay, Loses on Loper Bright Issue

A Mitre Corp. engineer with long-haul Covid won retroactive disability benefits from Reliance Standard Life Insurance Co., according to a federal court ruling declining to second-guess the Labor Department’s claims processing deadlines following the death of Chevron deference.

The opinion by Judge Anthony J. Trenga considered whether the Labor Department’s 45-day deadline for benefit plan administrators to respond to appeals of denied claims is invalid under the US Supreme Court’s June decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which abandoned the decades-old Chevron doctrine of deferring to administrative agencies’ interpretations of unclear laws.

Reliance had argued the deadline ...