San Francisco All Over?

With the passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act ("ERISA") in 1974, employers came to believe that a balkanized system of state and local rules governing group health plans would never develop because this federal law mandated uniform national regulation of employee benefit plans. The State of Maryland and Suffolk County, New York, recently enacted group health plan mandates. When those mandates were challenged, the federal courts ruled that they were invalid because ERISA gave exclusive power to the federal government to regulate employee benefit plans (discussed below). The City of San Francisco (the "City") also adopted its own group health plan mandate, in the form of an ordinance that became effective on January 1, 2008. The new health plan law, officially titled the "San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance" (the "Ordinance"), is also referred to as "Healthy San Francisco." An