On March 1, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. that a Vermont law requiring comprehensive claims information to be conveyed to the state’s all-payer claims database was preempted by the federal ERISA statute and could not be applied to self-insured employers or their third-party administrators. Almost immediately, commentators on both sides of the political aisle objected to the ruling, which makes it seem as if nobody won the case. To my way of looking at it, a better conclusion is that nobody lost.
It is important to understand that the vote in Gobeille wasn’t close. Justice Kennedy (writing for the Court) and five other justices found the Vermont law preempted because data collection and reporting are core ERISA functions, and Justice Scalia would have agreed with them had he lived to see the opinion released. Only Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented, somewhat uncharacteristically defending states’ rights and resisting federal uniformity.
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