Boston ERISA Law Blog

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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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.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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You know that theme music from the movie Jaws? Cue it up - the sharks are circling the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act. Hard on the heels of the recent reports that the state is going to have to increase the financial obligations of employers to maintain the near universal coverage called for by the act comes this story noting the same thing I said yesterday, that increasing the obligations the act imposes on employers will likely provoke a preemption challenge. The story quotes a D.C. lawyer, Kevin Wrege, who says that several law firms there are getting ready to file suit over this and that "[a]ll they are lacking is a paying client and a green light." (I think that quote is what started the Jaws theme playing in the juke box of my mind.)

More substantively, here is an interesting survey piece from the Congressional Research Service (really, one of the jewels of the federal government, a source of generally thoughtful non-partisan analysis, in my experience) on ERISA preemption and its application to “pay or play statutes.” In particular, the piece focuses on the Massachusetts statute, and on the question of whether the First Circuit will find it preempted if it is challenged. In essence, and not too surprisingly, the author finds that the statute will likely be found preempted if the First Circuit follows the reasoning of the Fourth Circuit in Fielder (concerning the Wal-Mart Act in Maryland), but not if the First Circuit follows the reasoning to date of the Ninth Circuit in the on-going litigation over the San Francisco ordinance.

The piece also provides an interesting and detailed explanation of the provisions of the Massachusetts statute, and how it operates. The article parrots something I have said often on this blog, which is that it is likely that the low burdens at this point placed on employers by these provisions of the act is the likely reason no one has challenged it to date as preempted. When you read the piece, you will see pretty clearly both how low those burdens are at this point (it is hard, for instance, to imagine any major employer not already being in compliance just as a matter of course with the “play” requirements of the statute as they are described in the article, thus precluding the statute from significantly affecting them or their bottom lines) but also the avenues for those burdens to be increased.

Thanks is due to BenefitsLink, by the way, for passing the report along.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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I have said it before and I will say it again: the day they fess up to the real costs of insuring the uninsured in Massachusetts and admit they need to pass that cost onto employers is the day before someone files a lawsuit asserting that the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act is preempted. Take a look at this, and this.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | Many, many people object to ERISA preemption, viewing it as some sort of nasty trick that defendants use to avoid liability in ERISA related cases. Do a quick search for ERISA and preemption on Google Blog and you will find that out pretty quick. But to me, they misunderstand preemption, which was a legitimate policy choice by the Congress that passed ERISA to maintain one consistent federal policy and body of law for purposes of employee benefits. It is worth noting that, some thirty years, countless judicial decisions enforcing preemption, and even more countless numbers of critics later, Congress still has never acted to change that - to, in effect, preempt preemption. Stories like this one here, about the funding problems with Massachusetts’ much lauded - and legally questionable under preemption standards - pay or play law validate Congress’ decision in this regard, as it demonstrates the sheer impossibility of executing effective major change in any significant area of employee benefit law - in this instance with regard to health insurance and health care - on a state by state level. As the article discusses, Massachusetts finds itself unable to fund the universal health care initiative it passed, to much self-congratulation, recently, and is now forced to change the financing structure that it originally relied upon and which was the basis for the law’s enaction and lack of preemption challenge; as I have discussed in the past on this blog, the Massachusetts act, unlike pay or play statutes and ordinances in virtually every other instance, has not been challenged in court as preempted simply because the direct financial burden on the business community was, as enacted, minimal, but I have predicted before that: (1) the statute will inevitably result in an increase of the costs passed onto the business community; and (2) a preemption challenge will come not long after that occurs. As the article reflects, the first one of those events is knocking at the door right now; the second one won’t be long behind it.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In 401(k) Plans , Fiduciaries , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | My trial finally concluded late yesterday after two weeks, with the jury returning a verdict in favor of my client (pause here for self-congratulatory pat on the back). While I was able to get some posts up last week, during the first week of trial, events during trial this past week left me with no time to post. A lot went on during that week that would be of interest to readers of this blog, running from the almost certain ERISA litigation that will follow from the Bear Stearns collapse, to further Department of Labor attempts to mandate transparency, to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ continuing efforts to single handedly prove that state regulation of employer provided health insurance benefits should, in fact, be preempted. We’ll return to these themes, and other topics, next week, now that we have time to get the printing press rolling again here.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | A number of different things I want to talk about, including an interesting decision discussing the obligations of plan sponsors when it comes to selecting advisors and some interesting thoughts on QDROs. I will sprinkle those in later, but for now I thought I would pass along Steve Bailey of the Boston Globe’s column today on the issues raised by the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act, which basically mirrors what I have said in prior posts, such as my last one, about the statute and issues with its implementation. A couple of interesting tidbits to point out though, from his column. First note his reference to the fact that the statute effectively left the business community off the hook (in truth, this is only true financially, and even then only partly so; they still bear some administrative headaches, and some currently modest financial exposures), which fits exactly with my explanation in the past as to why the statute has not faced a preemption challenge in court to date. Second note his reference to the idea that the political and legislative will to continue with the program is strong. All well and good, but the issue now is the plan’s escalating costs, which are going to have to be borne by taxpayers or else by the business community; one wonders about the commitment of those who will actually have to pay the bill for this program. Anyone going to ask them?

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | 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.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | I’ve noted in the past that the problem with state health care reform acts mandating health insurance is that they don’t tackle the issue that is deterring employers from providing broader health insurance benefits, namely the ever increasing and rapidly escalating cost of health insurance. In response, Massachusetts lawyer David Harlow argues on his blog that incremental steps towards resolving this problem are moving forward on their own schedule, separate from state legislation mandating employer provided health benefits, and cost control will come in time. Personally, I am skeptical that governments can actually control these costs, or even significantly reduce their annual rate of increase, but I would be happy to be wrong.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | People with thin skins - or who can’t laugh at themselves - shouldn’t write blogs. I got a good chuckle out of this over my morning coffee this morning.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | There’s a lot to be said about the preemption issues raised by state health insurance mandates and the assumptions that underlie the beliefs of those who argue that ERISA preemption should not be allowed to prevent states from experimenting with acts intended to remedy the problem of the uninsured. Articles like this one here, however, suggest the naivety of some of those assumptions, such as the idea that states are likely to really manage the problem in a more effective way than employers, operating under ERISA preemption, have managed to do so to date. Moreover, the article, in its discussion of the huge and apparently unexpected, or at least unplanned for, increase in the cost of insuring the uninsured under the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act, really drives home a point I have made in other posts, that the problem with these statutes is that they do nothing to address the real problem affecting employer provision of health benefits, namely the extraordinary cost of providing those benefits; as the article reflects, Massachusetts’ much lauded experiment doesn’t target that at all, but simply shifts the pockets that will have to fund those extraordinary and ever increasing costs. And finally, if you look closely at some of the numbers discussed in the article, you come to understand the answer I have given to people who have wanted to know why no one has yet challenged the Massachusetts act as preempted; as I have told people, it’s not because the act isn’t preempted, it is instead because the financial costs to employers have yet to warrant such a challenge. The article explains that the state is anticipating some 400 million dollars in additional costs to provide health insurance under the statute to the uninsured, costs to be assumed by the taxpayers rather than by businesses through any obligation under the mandate to provide insurance; in this way, the Massachusetts statute is much more a mechanism - Trojan horse, some might say - to transfer the costs of the uninsured onto the tax rolls, rather than, by employer mandates, onto the business community. I think it is a safe bet that, had the act been drafted to transfer more of the health insurance costs onto the business community rather than onto the state taxpayers, you would have quickly seen a preemption challenge mounted. And finally in this regard, note the article’s reference to the amount of money that employers have paid to date for not providing the health insurance required by the statute, which is the underwhelming amount of 5 million dollars. I suspect Wal-Mart spent not too much less in legal fees to get the Maryland Fair Share Act overturned, and those aren’t numbers, spread across an entire business community, that are likely to provoke any economically rational business person to want to fund litigation over the act. Start to see those numbers creep up substantially, however, and you can safely plan for a preemption challenge.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | I’ve got a few things lined up this week to talk about, running from long term disability benefits litigation to avoiding ERISA litigation to subprime mortgages, but first I am going to veer off of my planned course to pass along and comment on a pair of interesting posts that showed up in my in-box today. They are both on the subject of California’s interest in trying to enact a fair share type statute imposing employer mandates and requiring the provision of health insurance, and you can find them here and here. I have talked before about the fact that California, like other state and local governments who tread this path, are likely walking right smack into the buzz saw of ERISA preemption, and much like the legislature of Maryland did in enacting its fair share act that was struck down by the courts, appear to be simply sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to this issue. That’s really the point of the two posts, which ask why the state government in California is moving in this direction without anyone even addressing this issue or trying to resolve it preemptively, before enacting a law that parallels laws that have been struck down from coast to coast (see this post here and here, for instance) as preempted. I asked the question before about the Maryland statute, the so-called Wal-Mart act, as to how the Maryland legislature could have gone down this road without having considered the ERISA preemption problem in advance, and these posts suggest that California is doing the same. Perhaps I need to create a category over on the left side of this blog titled “those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it,” for the sole purpose of covering the seemingly endless examples in the area of health insurance of one state after another repeating the earlier mistakes of other state governments.

One of the posts on California’s efforts in this regard, namely this one here, suggests that some elements of the state government effort believe that the state can craft a statute that will not run afoul of ERISA or be preempted by ERISA. I am pretty skeptical that this is anything more than whistling past the graveyard. The closest I can come to an example of a state fair share type act that has not yet been found preempted is the Massachusetts health care reform act, and in my view, the only reason that hasn’t been declared preempted yet is that its burdens on employers are sufficiently limited at this point that no one has been motivated to challenge it in court. If anyone thinks that the entire business community (who, in the clever words of the New Yorker, have been unofficially deputized to carry the costs of health insurance in this country) would take a pass on this as well and allow a bellwether state like California to enact such a statute without it being challenged, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn that I’d like to sell you.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act
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Permalink | Well now, this morning I came across this interesting post here, on the State Policy Blog, comparing health insurance pricing in one semi-unregulated state insurance market (Colorado) and in a state, Massachusetts, with a state mandate requiring health insurance. As you can see from the post, the numbers show pricing is significantly higher in Massachusetts, which obviously now has a health care reform act in place that effectively requires employers and individuals to purchase health insurance, than it is in the unregulated portion of the Colorado market. The author’s intent is to demonstrate that state mandates and state regulation drive up pricing, but I am not convinced that the simple comparison of pricing demonstrates this at all. Initially, I can’t vouch for the actual data, or for the author’s characterization of the Colorado market in comparison to the Massachusetts market. But even if you take the numbers at face value, they threaten to prove nothing more than the truth of the old saying that there are three kinds of lies - lies, darn' lies and statistics. This is because, as discussed in prior posts such as this one, Massachusetts has very high costs of actual medical care compared to other regions of the country, for reasons that may very well be unique to Massachusetts and possibly as well to the few other areas of the country that, like Massachusetts, have a particularly high concentration of major teaching hospitals. Its been years since I have been to Colorado, but I don’t think, to my recollection and on my general reading, that it’s health care and health insurance market fits that description. As a result, comparing Colorado health insurance pricing to Massachusetts’ health insurance pricing is simply comparing apples to oranges - or maybe, given the states we are talking about, to cranberries - and tells you nothing about the effect on pricing of state mandates such as the one recently enacted in Massachusetts. That said though, it’s an interesting question how state mandates impact pricing compared to markets without state mandates in place, and I would love to see a carefully constructed economic study on the subject. Anyone seen any? If so, I’d love to see it.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act
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Permalink | Okay, I mentioned on Friday that I had come across some other interesting blogs and sites over the last few weeks that I wanted to pass along, and that I would do so over the next few days. I jumped off track on doing that right off the bat with this morning’s post on insurance and prior knowledge issues, but now I will return to one of those other blogs I wanted to pass along.

I have talked a lot about the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act, and one of the things I discussed recently was Professor David Hyman’s article in which he pointed out that the "Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act has problems [unique to it] that stem from the particularly high cost of health care in Massachusetts relative to the rest of the country.” On this point, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., the Executive Assistant for Policy and Program Review for the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner, recently had a terrific post on his Regulating Health Insurance blog that breaks down the component costs of health insurance and analyzes what elements are driving the high cost of health insurance. Echoing Professor Hyman’s point that it is the high cost of the health care itself that is problematic, John carefully documents that the high cost of health insurance is in fact driven by the cost of medical care itself and not, as is frequently argued and assumed by critics, by insurer profits. It’s an interesting analysis that fits well in any consideration of the merits and problems of state health insurance reform acts. Of course, the willingness of the public and the political class to accept John’s assertion that the driving factors in high health premiums are the costs of medical care itself isn’t helped by stories like this one here.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act
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Permalink | I have written before that the underlying structural problem with fair share and similar acts, like the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act, that seek to mandate the provision of health insurance by employers is twofold: first, they play at the margins of a problem that is fundamentally about the base economics of health care costs and, second, they are walking advertisements for the law of unexpected consequences. Two stories that showed up on my (electronic) doorstep yesterday illustrate this beautifully. In the first, Healthcare Reform: The Economics of Pay or Play Employer Mandates, two Cornell University economists explain that, as expected, mandating the provision of health insurance will reduce employment levels among the exact population of lower waged - and presumably lower benefitted - workers that the statutes are intended to help by mandating that health insurance be added to their employment compensation. The authors further argue, however, that the statutes are “blunt instruments” for targeting the problem of the uninsured, as they have negative impacts on employees who already have health insurance through other sources, including by reducing employment levels of such employees. The point, in many ways, of this and other criticism of these statutes is that they look good on the surface, and certainly score political points in some instances for those who have championed them, but in practice they are nowhere near a panacea for the growing problem of the uninsured, a problem I have explained in past posts is one of fundamental economics related to the extraordinary costs that providing health insurance imposes on employers. And that leads directly to the second story of interest, from yesterday’s New York Times, explaining how Wal-Mart, the direct target of some of the pay or play mandates, such as the one enacted in Maryland, having defeated in court statutory attempts to force it to increase its health insurance spending, is beefing up the level of health benefits provided to its employees on its own as being good business and sound economics. The problem with health insurance and the issue of the uninsured is about fundamental economics, and these pay or play mandates, because they can’t repeal whatever laws exist in the dismal science, can’t strike at the root causes of the issue.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | If, like me, you are fascinated not just by ERISA but by history and politics, this two part law review article, by James Wooten at the University at Buffalo Law School, on how ERISA preemption came to be, looks to be a must read. Here’s the abridged version of the story detailed in his articles: 

[The first of his two articles] recounts the key role of preemption issues in Congress's decision to pass ERISA. Until shortly before ERISA's enactment, employers and the AFL-CIO opposed comprehensive pension reform legislation. When states threatened to regulate private pension and welfare plans, however, the business community's and the AFL-CIO's strong desire for preemption all but forced them to support a federal pension reform law. Their support made passage of such legislation a virtual certainty. [The second of his two articles continues the story, explaining] how preemption issues led Congress to pass a broader pension reform law than it might otherwise have done. Business groups and the Nixon Administration hoped the congressional tax committees would limit the scope of federal regulation of pension plans. The congressional rules, however, gave jurisdiction over Congress's power to preempt state employment laws to the labor committees. Their control over preemption allowed the labor committees to bargain for broader regulation than business groups and the Administration preferred.

Some twenty years or so ago, the historian Arthur Schlesinger published his book The Cycles of American History, on the idea that certain themes in American political life rise, fall, and then rise again over predictable periods of time. In much the same way, you can see, in the current rush by states to enact fair share and other health insurance reform laws, a rebirth of the same urge to regulate that, as Professor Wooten points out, gave rise to ERISA preemption in the first place, some thirty years ago.

You can download Professor Wooten’s articles detailing this history here (the first article) and here (the second).

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act
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Permalink | In yesterday’s post on Darren Abernethy’s paper on Fair Share statutes, I ended up riffing on the question of whether the Maryland legislature, by putting before the courts a particularly bad version of such a statute, had distorted the development of the law of ERISA preemption in a manner that would only hurt the cause of those who favor state health insurance mandates. I wondered whether the case law would develop differently if more balanced statutes, like the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act, were analyzed by courts without the landscape of ERISA preemption having already been filled in by the decision holding the Maryland act to be preempted.

Critics of the Massachusetts act would likely argue that the Massachusetts version is so rife with problems that it is just as well if the legal environment, now that the Fourth Circuit has found the Maryland version of these types of laws to be preempted, is not too welcoming to such acts. That seems like a fair conclusion after reading law professor David Hyman’s piece on the “good, the bad and the ugly” in the Massachusetts statute, in which he pretty much takes the statute to task for being a poorly designed piece of state law. The Workplace Prof passed the article along, and you can find it here.

To the extent that the author’s analysis of the statute is right - that as economics and policy it just doesn’t work - it seems to support two points I have raised before on this blog concerning the Massachusetts act. First, that the questionable elements of the various acts enacted by the states suggest that federal preemption is a good thing, as a bulwark against what may be ill-conceived ideas by state governments when it comes to the topic of health insurance reform. And second, that the problem with these types of acts is that they play at the margins, and neither can nor do address the real cause of the problem of the uninsured, namely the incredible - and ever increasing - costs to employers of subsidizing health insurance in this country. This second point is one that appears to animate Professor Hyman’s piece, as he reflects on the fact that the Massachusetts statute has problems that stem from the particularly high cost of health care in Massachusetts relative to the rest of the country, as well as on the fact that the statute’s mandates are distorted by the high rate of health care inflation.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | Here is Darren Abernethy’s law review note on preemption of state fair share acts that mandate that employers provide certain levels of health insurance. His note, which I have discussed before, is very well done, and Darren has generously allowed me to share it here in full. As readers may recall from earlier posts, Darren discusses the fact that the Maryland Fair Share Act, which as he points out in his note targeted Wal-Mart, was found by the Fourth Circuit to be preempted, and Darren proposes ways to create statutes of this type that might avoid preemption. It’s a terrific note, and in particular his history of the preemption jurisprudence is an excellent tutorial on that particular issue, and I myself will be quick to cite it on that point when briefing the issue in the future.

One particular aspect of Darren’s note struck a chord with me, and provoked a somewhat chilling thought. In discussing ways to craft these types of legislation that might avoid the preemption problem, he recommends - in essence - that such legislation be broad based, which is the opposite, in many ways, of the Maryland Fair Share Act, which I have argued before can be seen almost as a punitive statute aimed at only one employer. We all know the old saying that bad facts make bad law (or is it hard cases make bad law?), and the question that arises is whether that is a fair understanding of the Fourth Circuit’s Fielder decision that found Maryland’s Fair Share Act to be preempted. The Maryland statute clearly aimed at only one employer and was drafted to avoid implicating favored large Maryland employers such as Johns Hopkins Hospital, and that aspect of the statute can be seen in the district court and Fourth Circuit rulings as at least influencing, and possibly animating, the holdings by those courts that the statute was preempted. Might things have come out differently in the district court and the Fourth Circuit absent that factor? The statute might still have been found to be preempted, but it seems to me that  those courts may at the least have been more open - even if still finding the act to be preempted - to nudging the law of preemption along in a way more favorable to these types of statutes had the courts been presented with a better and fairer looking attempt to mandate health insurance benefits. In essence, would the development of this area of the law be a little different if the leading court of appeals analysis of such a statute were, for example, of Massachusetts’ somewhat problematic but nonetheless broader health care reform act, than it will be given that the Fielder decision striking down the Maryland act now holds place of pride in that area of the law? Did the Maryland legislature, by putting one of the worst possible versions of such a statute before the courts, prevent the law from moving in a direction that might have helped such statutes avoid preemption?

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act
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Permalink | I have written a fair amount about whether the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act is preempted by ERISA, but not too much about the practicalities of complying with the act for as long as it remains unchallenged and unpreempted. This despite the fact that I have been asked a lot of questions about compliance by companies trying to understand their obligations under the act and who are trying to structure their operations to abide by it. An excellent website discussing the practicalities of the act and compliance crossed my desk the other day, maintained and made available by the Massachusetts Association of Health Underwriters (geez, there’s an association for everything these days). For those of you interested in the practicalities of the act, its an excellent resource. This link will take you right to it.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Medicaid , Preemption
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Permalink | We previously mentioned William and Mary law student Darren Abernethy’s upcoming law review note presenting ideas on how to enact so-called fair share legislation - which attempts to obligate employers to provide certain levels of health insurance coverage - without running afoul of ERISA preemption. His note is now out, and those of you who, like me, don’t subscribe to the William and Mary Law Review, can access it right here. Here’s his abstract on what the note argues: 

This Note examines Maryland's preempted statute and the United States District Court case that granted its opponents declaratory relief. After reviewing the Fair Share Act, the federal ERISA statute, and the significant changes in Supreme Court jurisprudence towards ERISA preemption in the past decade, this Note will offer new approaches through which states can modify the analytical framework outlined by the Fair Share Act to achieve improvements in the state-financing of Medicaid through large private employers. The goal of this Note is to analyze ways to fit future "fair share" legislation within the non-preempted confines of ERISA.

The proposed modifications include: (1) rewriting "fair share" laws as unequivocal, non-regulatory Medicaid taxes from which compliant employers may become exempt; (2) dulling the sharp edge of the FSA's punitive texture through decreasing the 100% shortfall tax to 35-50%; (3) expanding the options that employers have as "outlets" for meeting the 8% health expenditure benchmark, such as through an increase in non-medical fringe benefits, thus giving the statute a less coercive feel; (4) a "total package" benefits approach analogous to unpreempted ERISA prevailing wage cases; and (5) a state-initiated higher minimum wage for very large employers, with an incentivized exemption provision stating that an employer can revert back to the state or federal government's general minimum wage if the employer spends a certain percentage of payroll wages on employee health insurance.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | I have posted a fair amount on the impact of what are becoming known generically as “Fair Share” statutes, which are attempts to “reform” health insurance on a state level by means of mandating that employers provide health insurance benefits. I have talked about three main themes in my various posts on this topic, all of which stem from a certain skepticism as to whether these types of legislative responses to the problem of the uninsured are as well thought out as they are well intended. The first is the question of whether they are preempted by ERISA, and whether the rush by many states into this topic is a waste of resources, on the thesis that these state initiatives are likely to be found preempted, under the current state of the law. The second is the question of intended and unintended outcomes, and whether many of these state laws are really well thought out, or, two, whether the legislatures enacting them really know what they are getting into (for instance, just think of the Maryland legislature naively believing it could enact a statute that only mandated health insurance for Wal-Mart employees without running afoul of ERISA preemption, which of course ended in the federal courts striking the act down as preempted). And the third, finally, is the fact that these acts don’t target the real problem underlying the high rates of the uninsured, namely the ever increasing costs of health insurance. I have talked about all of these quite a bit, and you can find posts on them by clicking on the preemption, health insurance, or Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act headings over on the left hand side of this blog.

Here’s a couple of interesting articles I wanted to pass along that hit on at least two, and maybe three, of these themes. The first is this article here, titled “Labor Market Effects of Employer Provided Health Insurance,” which explores the question of how mandating that employers provide health insurance, as many of these state reform acts do, impacts employment. One of its findings? That mandating health insurance for all workers does in fact distort the labor market, but that even more interestingly, although perhaps as one would expect, “mandating the insurance only for full-time workers leads to higher [rates of] coverage than [without a mandate, but also to] an increased number of part-time workers.” If, as one would expect and this article suggests, there is a trade off between employment and the extent to which state laws mandate health insurance coverage, one would hope that state legislatures carefully analyze this issue before joining the current rush to mandate health insurance coverage.

Now, I am beginning to feel obliged by the tenor of my posts on this issue to note that I don’t disagree that the rate of the uninsured in this country is a real problem, and that my skepticism really runs to whether the increasing number of state attempts to address the problem - something they are probably foreclosed from doing by ERISA preemption anyway - represents the most thoughtful and effective way to tackle this problem. And this thought leads to the second paper I wanted to mention, which is law student Darren Abernathy’s upcoming law review note addressing the question of how to draft these types of laws to avoid ERISA preemption. This, at least, is a thoughtful attempt to get around some of the problems that arise when states target the problem of the uninsured by means of health insurance reform statutes. We need more of that type of forward looking and proactive analysis, and less of the willy nilly charge into the issue we are seeing by many state and local governments, who, having apparently learned nothing from Maryland’s experience, just keep enacting legislation on the slim hope that it won’t be preempted, rather than on an analysis and strategy that might place the statutes they enact outside the scope of ERISA preemption.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Employee Benefit Plans , Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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If David Rossmiller can do a potpourri to avoid writing a full fledged blog post then, by gosh, so can I. Conveniently enough, I had some three small items on my mind this morning anyway, all of which I will mention here in one fell swoop:

? More on Bowater: For those of you who were interested in yesterday’s post about the First Circuit’s ruling in Bowater, concerning termination of a benefit plan and a foul up in executing it as part of a corporate acquisition, the ever watchful S.Cotus, who never misses anything on any subject at the First Circuit over at Appellate Law & Practice, has this in-depth review of the Bowater decision. S.Cotus delves into the labor law issues that were also at play in the case, in addition to the ERISA issue that I commented on yesterday. 

? I posted earlier in the week on the question of rising health insurance costs and how that was the elephant in the room that all of these state based attempts to reform health insurance were avoiding, and how that justified the preemption of those state acts in favor of a federalized and consistent nationwide approach to the problem. The Boston Globe has a detailed article today laying out the extent of the increase in health insurance costs just here in Massachusetts. The essence of the article is in the opening paragraph: “Massachusetts health insurers are predicting their rates will increase by about 10 percent next year for most residents covered through employer health plans, marking the eighth consecutive year of double-digit premium hikes.” Funny, but Massachusetts just implemented health reform legislation, so how can this be? The answer, I suspect, is in this post here.

? And finally, on a sillier note, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog is fascinated right now with preemption, posting several times on various applications of the doctrine in the last few days. Yet despite the fixation on preemption, they omit entirely what we all know is the most important and interesting application of preemption, namely ERISA preemption. While I write slightly tounge in cheek on this point, the truth is that, as we see with the attempts of states to legislate health insurance coverage in the face of ERISA preemption, this is in fact the one area of preemption that consistently affects broad numbers of everyday, real life people, as opposed to the smaller subset of directly affected businesses involved in the preemption cases discussed by the Wall Street Journal Law Blog over the last couple of days.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Industry News , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | Someone once said that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that everything is economics. Nothing illustrates this maxim more than the various attempts by states to get around ERISA preemption - such as discussed here and here - and mandate health insurance coverage in one manner or another. These attempts by states - which are simply doomed to eventual court declarations that they are preempted- seek to force employers to expand health care availability and, in some cases such as Massachusetts, to get those who fall outside of the employer provided health insurance system to buy their own coverage. The problem is that these legislative attempts don’t affect the real problem, which is that the costs of providing health insurance has escalated to the point where employers face huge financial disincentives to expand their offerings of health insurance and uncovered employees cannot afford their own policies. Here it is in stark black and white (literally, since it comes from the NY Times, rather than from the USA Today, where I guess it would be in stark color): “[t]he cost of employer-sponsored health insurance premiums has increased 6.1 percent this year, well ahead of wage trends and consumer price inflation, but below the 7.7 percent increase in 2006, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported today.” Beyond that, the article points out that “health costs had increased 78 percent since 2001, more than four times as fast as prices and wages.”

The ever increasing impact on the bottom line of providing health insurance is why the employer provided system isn’t expanding to cover more people, and why the uninsured cannot insure themselves. Although the Massachusetts reform act takes some steps towards altering that dynamic, at least with regards to those not covered by employer provided plans and who must instead insure themselves, the simple fact is the various state reform acts aren’t really directed at fixing this fundamental base line problem (and they probably can’t attack this problem effectively on a state by state basis, just further driving home a point I have made previously, that the availability of health insurance coverage probably should not be addressed on a state by state basis, should be addressed on a national basis, and that ERISA preemption of these types of state acts is a good thing as a result). Unless and until the base problem of the economic numbers is tackled, these reform acts aren’t targeting the actual disease, just some of the symptoms of it.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | I posted a couple of days back about California’s interest in enacting a state health care reform law that, like the current law in Massachusetts and the Maryland Fair Share Act that was struck down by the courts, operates at least in part by imposing new obligations on employers who provide health insurance to their employees. In the post, I noted my skepticism that the state could pull this off without running afoul of ERISA preemption. The National Law Journal has an interesting article, available here, on the same subject, from which I took away two thoughts. The first is that the consensus opinion is exactly the one I voiced earlier this week, that California’s attempt is almost certain to be subject to preemption if challenged in court. The second is that any statutory enactment of this nature in California is, in fact, certain to be challenged in court, and quickly, if only because of California’s bellwether status in American economic and political culture, and the possible influence on other states if such a statute is allowed to stand in California.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | There’s an entertaining little story today in the Boston Globe on the question of whether, in the next few weeks, the California legislature and the Governor will roll out a state plan to reform health insurance by adding fees and other obligations to the employer provided health care system with the intent of providing universal health insurance, similar in some ways to what Massachusetts has done. I have talked frequently here about Massachusetts’ plan, which is in its earliest stages of implementation, with some concomitant glitches. Readers of this blog know I am highly skeptical of the ability of states to fashion these types of plans without running afoul of ERISA preemption, and, without knowing the details of the California plan, I am pretty skeptical they can pull it off either. In a nice little juxtaposition, for those of you who are interested in the question of how ERISA preemption impacts these types of attempts by states to change the health insurance paradigm, Sharon Reece out of the University of Maryland Law School has a very timely paper that is just out addressing the barrier posed by ERISA preemption to these types of state laws. The paper itself is available here, and the post from Richard Bales at Workplace Prof that brought it to my attention a few weeks back is here.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act
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Permalink | There’s a nice interview today on the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly website with the general counsel of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Patricia McGovern. While the story is interesting enough in and of itself on the subject of the structure of a major hospital law department, I took particular note of Ms. McGovern’s comment that the hospital will be impacted by the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act because of its expected effect on the state’s subsidized care pool. I have generally focused on that statute from the point of view of its impact on the business community and in particular on multi-state employers, and this was an excellent reminder that the statute is of concern to other affected parties for reasons unique to them.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | Roy Harmon over at his excellent Health Plan Law blog has the story of the decision last week by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Retail Industry Leaders Association v. Suffolk County, in which the court ruled that the Suffolk County Fair Share for Health Care Act (basically yet another local initiative directed at forcing Wal-Mart to provide greater health care coverage for its employees) is preempted by ERISA. The court’s opinion makes much of the fact that any attempt by a multi-state employer to comply with the statute would require the employer to create a different and separate administrative structure for that lone jurisdiction covered by the act, and that ERISA preemption applies as a result. The court’s approach drives home two points that I have commented on earlier in other posts on this blog.

First, with each local or state ordinance that is struck down as preempted, despite the attempt of each locality to insist that its statute is so fair or unintrusive that it should be left standing and it is alright if an employer has to do something different just with respect to that particular jurisdiction, it becomes apparent- or should, anyway, to anyone thinking through the issue - that, whatever the intentions of proponents of state laws altering health insurance on a state wide level, problems with the availability of health care and health insurance simply cannot be solved currently by a balkanized, state by state approach. Only addressing the problem at the federal level can possibly succeed; any other approach will result in employers facing the type of multiple and diverse administrative regimes that was rejected by the court in this most recent decision and that can only result in preemption.

Second, this decision points out that those who do not think that Massachusetts’ Health Care Reform Act is probably preempted are likely just whistling past the graveyard. Massachusetts’ statute is a fairly written and broadly applicable statute, and not the type of statute, like the one found preempted by the Eastern District of New York in this most recent preemption decision, that is simply a punitive statute, masquerading as a piece of broad based health care reform, directed at essentially one employer or one small class of employers (think big box retailers). Nonetheless, the exact same structural burdens and case law analyzed in the Eastern District’s decision likewise lead to the exact same conclusion - that ERISA preempts the act - when applied to the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act. In truth, all you really need to do is globally replace the references in the Eastern District’s decision to the Suffolk County act with references to the Massachusetts statute, and you have the future ruling finding that the Massachusetts act is preempted.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | Wow, don’t think Massachusetts’ health care reform law doesn’t dictate to employers what type of health insurance to provide, only in a more subtle way than the state of Maryland did with its Fair Share Act based - but unsuccessful, thanks to ERISA preemption- attempted bludgeoning of Wal-Mart? At the risk of picking a fight, which isn’t the reason I write this blog (trust me, with my practice, I have enough fights going on at any given time, without looking for one more), this seems to be what Brian King, over at his ERISA Law Blog, thinks. But it is hard to square that view with this article right here, from the Boston Globe today, explaining how the state’s largest health insurer has abandoned plans to offer employers the opportunity to provide employees with a healthcare plan involving only a 33% contribution by the employer, because of pressure from the state government, which wants higher contribution limits so as to better implement the state’s health care reform act.

Now I am not saying that a one third contribution by employers is what we should want, but there may well be businesses for whom that type of plan makes sense, and for whose employees it is a better option than whatever else the employer could afford. And there is little doubt, as you see in this article, that this is a choice that is being taken away from employers by state action, as a result of the health care reform act. In essence, the state is dictating higher employer contribution limits, apparently wanting them to be at 50% or better.

Now Brian’s post is about preemption, and whether the state act imposes the types of restrictions on employers that could render the act preempted. Requiring these higher levels of contribution by employers doesn’t necessarily mean the act is subject to ERISA preemption, but it is the kind of action that defeats the argument that the state’s health care reform act only minimally infringes on employers’ operation of their benefit plans and thus is not invasive enough to warrant preemption, an argument that I seem to see more and more when it comes to the Massachusetts health reform act.

Posted By Stephen D. Rosenberg In Health Insurance , Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act , Preemption
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Permalink | I have been meaning to come back to some issues concerning the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act, the state’s potentially groundbreaking attempt to combine individual, employer and government roles to provide health insurance coverage for most of the Commonwealth’s uninsured, and now seems like a good time to do so, with its effective date coming up right around the corner. I have discussed before the question of whether the Act may be preempted by ERISA, and, if challenged, it would not surprise me if the employer obligations under the Act are struck as preempted. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that the requirements imposed on employers by this particular statute are relatively benign, and this Act is nowhere near being the sort of heavy handed smackdown of particular targeted employers that was the now preempted and not particularly lamented law passed by the Maryland legislature that targeted Wal-Mart.

At the same time, the underlying issue with regard to preemption of state regulation of employer provided health insurance has to do with whether we should insist upon maintaining one consistent overlay of federal law and regulation on the subject, as is the case if state acts of this nature are consistently preempted, or whether we should instead, as the old saying goes, allow “a thousand flowers to bloom,” in the guise of allowing multiple different state experiments to address the problem of the uninsured. If the latter is to be the case, then that is where you really begin to run into problems of the type that underlie the preemption debate. It is one thing to say that the Massachusetts Act imposes only the most benign of record keeping and costs on nationwide employers, so perhaps preemption should not apply to it. But the issue becomes something entirely different when you instead consider having 30 or 40 or 50 states come up with their own experiments that likewise impose only minimal obligations on employers, each one so relatively benign, standing alone, that it is hard to justify declaring it preempted; when you combine all of those different regulatory regimes, however, then you start to get into the kind of conflicting and burdensome web of state actions that can become a real and legitimate burden to a nationwide employer. It is that ultimate result, that web of inconsistent state by state mandates, that the preemption requirement under ERISA is intended to guard against.

And a couple of other points on this question beg to be mentioned, although I don’t feel like I have seen them anywhere with regard to the preemption question. First, if you take away consistent overarching federal control of the question and allow state by state regulation of employer provided health insurance, how quick will we start to see a “race to the bottom” mentality, with at least some states looking to impose the least health care requirements possible on nationwide employers so as to attract businesses to relocate or at least site facilities there? We have seen it in the past with other subject areas that states pitch as competitive advantages over other states; I see no reason why health insurance should be one that is immune from such economic pressures and realities. There are certainly aspects of the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Act that I can think of right off the top of my head that a competing state could leave out, while incorporating in their own statutes all the other aspects of the Massachusetts Act, that might well tilt the balance - in at least a close case - for an employer deciding where to site its business.

Second, the idea of preferring state regulation of a health insurance marketplace that is predominately an employer provided product is premised, at heart, on the assumption that the state approaches will be an improvement over what could be done under the sort of federalized employer provided system we currently have.  How confident really are we about this?  It is probably fair to say we really won't know until at least some state - here Massachusetts - is allowed to impose its own regime and we wait and see how well it works out.

And when you consider all of these issues, this is when you start to get an inkling of why solving the uninsured problem on a federal level, rather than on a state by state level, with a consistent overall approach structured on the already existing infrastructure of the employer provided, ERISA governed model, may actually be the better approach.