Cite as: 506 U. S. 125 (1992)
Stevens, J., dissenting
prior holdings by this Court have given the supersession provision a broader reading. Thus, for example, in Shaw itself we held that the New York Human Rights Law, which prohibited employers from structuring their employee benefit plans in a manner that discriminated on the basis of pregnancy, was pre-empted even though ERISA did not contain any superseding regulatory provisions. 463 U. S., at 98. State laws that directly regulate ERISA plans, or that make it necessary for plan administrators to operate such plans differently, "relate to" such plans in the sense intended by Congress. In my opinion, a state law's mere reference to an ERISA plan is an insufficient reason for concluding that it is pre-empted—particularly when the state law itself is related almost solely to plans that Congress expressly excluded from the coverage of ERISA. It is anomalous to conclude that ERISA has superseded state regulation in an area that is expressly excluded from the coverage of ERISA.
The statute at issue in this case does not regulate any ERISA plan or require any ERISA plan administrator to make any changes in the administration of such a plan. Although the statute may grant injured employees who receive health insurance a better compensation package than those who are not so insured, it does so only to prevent a converse windfall going to injured employees who receive high weekly wages and little or no health insurance coverage.5 Even if the District's statute did encourage an employer to pay higher wages instead of providing better fringe benefits, that would surely be no reason to infer a congressional intent to supersede state regulation of a category of compensation programs that it exempted from federal coverage. Moreover, by requiring an injured worker's compensation to reflect his entire pay package, the statute attempts to replace fully the lost earning power of every injured employee. Noth-5 One of the statute's stated goals was "to promote a fairer system of compensation." Preamble to District of Columbia's Workers' Compensation Equity Amendment Act of 1990, 37 D. C. Register 6890 (Nov. 1990).
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