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.