Cite as: 519 U. S. 316 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
for Petitioner in Travelers, O. T. 1994, No. 93-1408, p. 1-2, the statute was asserted to run afoul of ERISA's preemption provision. The differential rates charged to commercially insured patients and to patients insured by Blue Cross/Blue Shield (collectively "the Blues") made commercial insurance relatively more expensive—and relatively less attractive. The resulting cost variations encouraged insurance purchasers, including ERISA plans, to provide insurance benefits through the Blues. Commercial insurers argued that these cost variations and their resulting economic effects had a "connection with" those ERISA plans, requiring pre-emption of the law that dictated them.
We upheld the statute. The "indirect economic influence" of the surcharge, we noted, did not "bind plan administrators to any particular choice and thus function as a regulation of an ERISA plan itself." 514 U. S., at 659. Nor did the indirect influence of the surcharge "preclude uniform administrative practice or the provision of a uniform interstate benefit package if a plan wishe[d] to provide one." Id., at 660. Indeed, if ERISA were concerned with any state action—such as medical-care quality standards or hospital workplace regulations—that increased costs of providing certain benefits, and thereby potentially affected the choices made by ERISA plans, we could scarcely see the end of ERISA's pre-emptive reach, and the words "relate to" would limit nothing. Id., at 660-661. We also noted that several States regulated hospital charges at the time that ERISA was enacted, and yet neither ERISA's language nor legislative history made any mention of pre-empting these state efforts.6
6 In fact, the very same Congress that enacted ERISA adopted, a short time later, the National Health Planning and Resources Development Act of 1974 (NHPRDA), Pub. L. 93-641, 88 Stat. 2225, §§ 1-3, repealed by Pub. L. 99-660, title VII, § 701(a), 100 Stat. 3799, which "sought to encourage and help fund state responses to growing health care costs and the widely diverging availability of health services." Travelers, supra, at 665. The NHPRDA had in mind a system akin to New York's, and we thought it
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