Capital Corner
By Will Melofchik – NCOIL General Counsel
Welcome to the latest installment of Capital Corner, a column that aims to update you on some of the issues that NCOIL is following. Below are issues that NCOIL will be discussing at the upcoming NCOIL Spring Meeting and monitoring throughout 2021.
On December 10, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an 8-0 opinion (Justice Barrett did not take part) that could be a gamechanger in the area of Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) preemption. In Rutledge v. Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA), the Court ruled that ERISA did not preempt Arkansas’s law (Act 900) regulating pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). The specific question presented to the Court was whether “the Eighth Circuit erred in holding that Arkansas’s statute regulating PBMs’ drug-reimbursement rates, which is similar to laws enacted by a substantial majority of States, is preempted by ERISA, in contravention of this Court’s precedent that ERISA does not preempt rate regulation.”
ERISA has long been a source of frustration for states seeking to enact meaningful healthcare reforms, mainly due to the inconsistent and arguably illogical manner in which courts have ruled how and why ERISA preempts certain state laws. NCOIL has been an active participant in calls to reform ERISA, having adopted a Resolution “In Support of Amending ERISA to Enable State Policymakers to Enact More Meaningful State Healthcare Reforms” and filed an amicus brief in Rutledge.1
Download to read more