Benefits & ERISA Law

A Random Walk Through the Ninth Circuit's Preemption Ruling

Disparate thoughts. Connect the dots. Or maybe more unintended consequences. Take your pick. While many advocates of health care reform cheer the Ninth Circuit’s conclusion that ERISA does not preempt all state pay or play laws, I am a little dubious as to whether this represents anything more than a Pyrrhic victory for anyone actually interested in ensuring that everyone is insured. Report after report, many of them credible, tell us that employers, who provide most of the country’s health insurance, are aghast at the idea of losing ERISA preemption, and would consider it one more reason not to continue to provide health insurance to employees and to instead pull back from that role. I am hardly inclined to think that, should employers relinquish that role, state or federal governments are prepared fiscally or intellectually to step into the breach and effectively fill that hole well. I thought this before, in the past, and wrote about it in a number of postings (such as here), when we saw the financial costs of Massachusetts’ reform plan balloon, supposedly unexpectedly; I thought it again when we saw the effectiveness of federal government regulation of Wall Street; and I thought it for sure when I read Paul Krugman this morning.

Perhaps this obsession among health reform advocates with defeating ERISA preemption is a case of putting the cart before the horse; maybe we should first have effective non-employer health insurance structures in place, before we go trying to dismantle the preemption structures on which employers rely in choosing to provide health insurance to their employees.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on October 06, 2008 (boomark / email).