378
Opinion of the Court
pendent review procedure is a form of binding arbitration that allows an ERISA beneficiary to submit claims to a new decisionmaker to examine Rush's determination de novo, supplanting judicial review under the "arbitrary and capricious" standard ordinarily applied when discretionary plan interpretations are challenged. Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. v. Bruch, 489 U. S. 101, 110-112 (1989). Rush says that the beneficiary's option falls within Pilot Life's notion of a remedy that "supplement[s] or supplant[s]" the remedies available under ERISA. 481 U. S., at 56.
We think, however, that Rush overstates the rule expressed in Pilot Life. The enquiry into state processes alleged to "supplemen[t] or supplan[t]" the federal scheme by allowing beneficiaries "to obtain remedies under state law that Congress rejected in ERISA," id., at 54, has, up to now, been far more straightforward than it is here. The first case touching on the point did not involve preemption at all; it arose from an ERISA beneficiary's reliance on ERISA's own enforcement scheme to claim a private right of action for types of damages beyond those expressly provided. Russell, 473 U. S., at 145. We concluded that Congress had not intended causes of action under ERISA itself beyond those specified in § 1132(a). Id., at 148. Two years later we determined in Metropolitan Life Ins. Co. v. Taylor, supra, that Congress had so completely preempted the field of benefits law that an ostensibly state cause of action for benefits was necessarily a "creature of federal law" removable to federal court. Id., at 64 (internal quotation marks omitted). Russell and Taylor naturally led to the holding in Pilot Life that ERISA would not tolerate a diversity action seeking monetary damages for breach generally and for consequential emotional distress, neither of which Congress had authorized in § 1132(a). These monetary awards were claimed as remedies to be provided at the ultimate step of plan enforcement, and even if they could have been characterized as products of "insurance regulation," they would have signifi-
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