Cite as: 508 U. S. 491 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
indirect effects are sufficient for a state law to avoid preemption under the McCarran-Ferguson Act. Id., at 217.8
We also hold that the preference accorded by Ohio to the expenses of administering the insolvency proceeding is reasonably necessary to further the goal of protecting policy-holders. Without payment of administrative costs, liquidation could not even commence. The preferences conferred upon employees and other general creditors, however, do not escape pre-emption because their connection to the ultimate aim of insurance is too tenuous. Cf. Langdeau v. United States, 363 S. W. 2d 327 (Tex. Civ. App. 1962) (state statute according preference to employee wage claims is not a law enacted for the purpose of regulating the business of insurance). By this decision, we rule only upon the clash of priorities as pronounced by the respective provisions of the federal statute and the Ohio Code. The effect of this decision upon the Ohio Code's remaining priority provisions—includ-8 The dissent assails our holding at both ends, contending that it at once goes too far and not quite far enough. On the one hand, the dissent suggests that our holding is too "broad" in the sense that "any law which redounds to the benefit of policyholders is, ipso facto, a law enacted to regulate the business of insurance." Post, at 511. But this is precisely the argument we reject in the text, as evidenced by the narrowness of our actual holding. Uncomfortable with our distinction between the priority given to policyholders and the priority afforded other creditors, the dissent complains, on the other hand, that this is evidence of a "serious flaw." Post, at 517. But the dissent itself concedes that a state statute regulating the liquidation of insolvent insurance companies need not be treated as a package which stands or falls in its entirety. Post, at 518. Given this concession, it is the dissent's insistence upon an all-or-nothing approach to this particular statute that is flawed. The dissent adduces no support for its assertion that we must deal with the various priority provisions of the Ohio law as if they were all designed to further a single end. That was not the approach taken by this Court in National Securities, which carefully parsed a state statute with dual goals and held that it regulated the business of insurance only to the extent that it protected policyholders. Supra, at 502. And the dissent misinterprets our pronouncement on the clash of priorities as a "compromise holding," post, at 517, forgetting that the severability of the various priority provisions is a question of state law.
509
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