356
Syllabus
in the saving clause requires an either-or choice between health care and insurance. Congress recognized, the year before passing ERISA, that HMOs are risk-bearing organizations subject to state insurance regulation. That conception has not changed in the intervening years. States have been adopting their own HMO enabling Acts, and at least 40, including Illinois, regulate HMOs primarily through state insurance departments. Rush cannot submerge HMOs' insurance features beneath an exclusive characterization of HMOs as health care providers. And the argument of Rush and its amici that § 4-10 sweeps beyond the insurance industry, capturing organizations that provide no insurance and regulating noninsurance activities of HMOs that do, is based on unsound assumptions. Pp. 366-373.
(2) The McCarran-Ferguson factors confirm this conclusion. A state law does not have to satisfy all three factors to survive preemption, and § 4-10 clearly satisfies two. The independent review requirement satisfies the factor that a provision regulate "an integral part of the policy relationship between the insurer and the insured." Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno, 458 U. S. 119, 129. Illinois adds an extra review layer when there is an internal disagreement about an HMO's denial of coverage, and the reviewer both applies a medical care standard and construes policy terms. Thus, the review affects a policy relationship by translating the relationship under the HMO agreement into concrete terms of specific obligation or freedom from duty. The factor that the law be aimed at a practice "limited to entities within the insurance industry," ibid., is satisfied for many of the same reasons that the law passes the commonsense test: It regulates application of HMO contracts and provides for review of claim denials; once it is established that HMO contracts are contracts for insurance, it is clear that § 4-10 does not apply to entities outside the insurance industry. Pp. 373-375.
(b) This Court rejects Rush's contention that, even though ERISA's saving clause ostensibly forecloses preemption, congressional intent to the contrary is so clear that it overrides the statutory provision. Pp. 375-386.
(1) The Court has recognized an overpowering federal policy of exclusivity in ERISA's civil enforcement provisions located at 29 U. S. C. § 1132(a); and it has anticipated that in a conflict between congressional polices of exclusively federal remedies and the States' regulation of insurance, the state regulation would lose out if it allows remedies that Congress rejected in ERISA, Pilot Life, 481 U. S., at 54. Rush argues that § 4-10 is preempted for creating the kind of alternative remedy that this Court disparaged in Pilot Life, one that subverts congressional intent, clearly expressed through ERISA's structure and legislative history, that the federal remedy displace state causes of action. Rush
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