§ 88.0015.Inapplicability to Erisa-Regulated Employee Benefit Plan

One sentence recognising a federal limit: this chapter does not apply to an employee benefit plan regulated under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.

The section was added in 2005, eight years after the chapter itself, and it records the outcome of litigation rather than a fresh policy choice.

ERISA preempts state laws relating to employee benefit plans, and its remedial scheme has been held to be exclusive for claims about benefits under such plans. A state cause of action against a managed care entity for a coverage decision under an employer-sponsored plan cannot survive that.

The practical effect is large. Most Americans with private health coverage have it through an employer, and most employer plans are ERISA plans — so this exclusion removes the majority of managed care arrangements from the chapter.

What remains are non-ERISA plans: individually purchased coverage, and governmental and church plans, which ERISA exempts from its own definition of an employee benefit plan.

The intimate visual material and online impersonation chapters contain structurally similar provisions acknowledging Section 230 preemption. In each case the Legislature legislated up to the federal boundary and marked where it stops.