Benefits & ERISA Law

The Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act as Evidence of the Need for Preemption

Stories like this make clear that advocates of state fair share plans who like to point to the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act as a shining exemplar of what could be accomplished if only ERISA preemption would go away are barking up the wrong tree. Rather, the article, with its discussion of spiraling costs to the state and the state’s need for federal funding to remedy the resulting shortfalls demonstrates the opposite, namely that, as I have argued in other posts, there is real reason to doubt whether the problem of the uninsured is one that can be cured on a state by state basis. Indeed, the fact that the Commonwealth needs significant - but as yet unpromised - infusions of federal money to effectuate coverage of the uninsured suggests that this problem cannot be solved by states and instead can only be solved on a larger playing field, namely at the federal level with the type of resources that only the federal government can commit to the issue. And if the issue can only be solved on a national level, and not on a state by state level, then isn’t that an argument for preemption? I hate to be a cynic, and prefer the title of skeptic, but there are a lot of reasons that ERISA preemption both exists and is valuable, and it is not the bogeyman preventing health insurance in this country that many of its critics make it out to be. There are real, fundamental problems in trying to increase health insurance coverage in this country, ones that are not solved by these state acts, which, as I have discussed before, basically play at the margins without addressing the real problem - cost - that is handicapping both the ability of employers to continue to provide health insurance to their employees and the ability of Massachusetts to actually successfully pull off its health insurance experiment.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on February 05, 2008 (boomark / email).