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Opinion of the Court
insurance. E. g., SEC v. National Securities, Inc., 393 U. S. 453, 460 (1969).
Rush says otherwise, citing Union Labor Life Ins. Co. v. Pireno, supra, and insisting that that case holds external review of coverage decisions to be outside the "policy relationship." But Rush misreads Pireno. We held there that an insurer's use of a "peer review" committee to gauge the necessity of particular treatments was not a practice integral to the policy relationship for the purposes of McCarran-Ferguson. 458 U. S., at 131-132. We emphasized, however, that the insurer's resort to peer review was simply the insurer's unilateral choice to seek advice if and when it cared to do so. The policy said nothing on the matter. The insurer's contract for advice from a third party was no concern of the insured, who was not bound by the peer review committee's recommendation any more, for that matter, than the insurer was. Thus it was not too much of an exaggeration to conclude that the practice was "a matter of indifference to the policyholder," id., at 132. Section 4-10, by contrast, is different on all counts, providing as it does a legal right to the insured, enforceable against the HMO, to obtain an authoritative determination of the HMO's medical obligations.
The final factor, that the law be aimed at a "practice . . . limited to entities within the insurance industry," id., at 129, is satisfied for many of the same reasons that the law passes the commonsense test. The law regulates application of HMO contracts and provides for review of claim denials; once it is established that HMO contracts are, in fact, contracts for insurance (and not merely contracts for medical care), it is clear that § 4-10 does not apply to entities outside the insurance industry (although it does not, of course, apply to all entities within it).
Even if we accepted Rush's contention, rejected already, that the law regulates HMOs even when they act as pure administrators, we would still find the third factor satisfied.
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