662
Opinion of the Court
S. Johnson, T. Jost, & R. Schwartz, Health Law §§ 1-6, 1-23 (1995).
In sum, cost uniformity was almost certainly not an object of pre-emption, just as laws with only an indirect economic effect on the relative costs of various health insurance packages in a given State are a far cry from those "conflicting directives" from which Congress meant to insulate ERISA plans. See 498 U. S., at 142. Such state laws leave plan administrators right where they would be in any case, with the responsibility to choose the best overall coverage for the money. We therefore conclude that such state laws do not bear the requisite "connection with" ERISA plans to trigger pre-emption.
C
This conclusion is confirmed by our decision in Mackey v. Lanier Collection Agency & Service, Inc., 486 U. S. 825 (1988), which held that ERISA pre-emption falls short of barring application of a general state garnishment statute to participants' benefits in the hands of an ERISA welfare benefit plan. We took no issue with the argument of the Mackey plan's trustees that garnishment would impose administrative costs and burdens upon benefit plans, id., at 831, but concluded from the text and structure of ERISA's preemption and enforcement provisions that "Congress did not intend to forbid the use of state-law mechanisms of executing judgments against ERISA welfare benefit plans, even when those mechanisms prevent plan participants from receiving their benefits." Id., at 831-832. If a law authorizing an indirect source of administrative cost is not pre-empted, it should follow that a law operating as an indirect source of merely economic influence on administrative decisions, as here, should not suffice to trigger pre-emption either.
The commercial challengers counter by invoking the earlier case of Metropolitan Life Ins. Co. v. Massachusetts, 471 U. S. 724 (1985), which considered whether a State could mandate coverage of specified minimum mental-health-care
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