Cite as: 536 U. S. 355 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
The answer to Rush is, of course, that an HMO is both: it provides health care, and it does so as an insurer. Nothing in the saving clause requires an either-or choice between health care and insurance in deciding a preemption question, and as long as providing insurance fairly accounts for the application of state law, the saving clause may apply. There is no serious question about that here, for it would ignore the whole purpose of the HMO-style of organization to conceive of HMOs (even in the traditional sense, see n. 1, supra) without their insurance element.
"The defining feature of an HMO is receipt of a fixed fee for each patient enrolled under the terms of a contract to provide specified health care if needed." Pegram v. Herdrich, 530 U. S. 211, 218 (2000). "The HMO thus assumes the financial risk of providing the benefits promised: if a participant never gets sick, the HMO keeps the money regardless, and if a participant becomes expensively ill, the HMO is responsible for the treatment . . . ." Id., at 218-219. The HMO design goes beyond the simple truism that all contracts are, in some sense, insurance against future fluctuations in price, R. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law 104 (4th ed. 1992), because HMOs actually underwrite and spread risk among their participants, see, e. g., R. Shouldice, Introduction to Managed Care 450-462 (1991), a feature distinctive to insurance, see, e. g., SEC v. Variable Annuity Life Ins. Co. of America, 359 U. S. 65, 73 (1959) (underwriting of risk is an "earmark of insurance as it has commonly been conceived of in popular understanding and usage"); Royal Drug, supra, at 214-215, n. 12 ("[U]nless there is some element of spreading risk more widely, there is no underwriting of risk").
So Congress has understood from the start, when the phrase "Health Maintenance Organization" was established and defined in the HMO Act of 1973. The Act was intended to encourage the development of HMOs as a new form of health care delivery system, see S. Rep. No. 93-129, pp. 7-9
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