Liberal Hysteria Over Supreme Court Saying No to Health Care Data Scheme of Vermont

The L.A. Times reports:

Vermont's goal was to give planners and consumers a clearer idea of what every doctor and hospital charges for every procedure. This is a key to the nirvana of consumer-driven healthcare and to holding costs down, because those ends can't be met unless the actual costs are known. Information about what providers charge patients is the most closely guarded secret in the healthcare industry. Vermont was one of 18 states attempting to compile what's known as an all-payer claims database.

The Court's decision was not a conservative-liberal split, but 6-2, with liberal Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joining the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.


At the heart of the split was not ideology but the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, or ERISA, which governs retirement and health insurance benefits and involves perhaps the most far-reaching preemption of state law in the federal code. It's so broad, indeed, that the Court has on occasion tried to place modest bounds on the preemption out of fear that otherwise "preemption would never run its course," as the Court observed in a 1995 case. But not this time.

The "planners" lose a big one.