Cigna and the other plaintiffs say the effort violates the federal Employee Retirement Income Protection Act by ignoring an ERISA provision that preempts state regulation of employee benefit plans.

The ERISA Industry Committee filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota along with Cigna Group, Cigna’s subsidiary Cigna Health and Life Insurance Company, and the National Labor Alliance of Health Care Coalitions, a group for union health plans.

The defendants are the Minnesota Department of Commerce and Grace Arnold, the Minnesota Commerce Commissioner.

Congress created ERISA preemption to reduce the cost of offering employee benefit plans in multiple states by giving the U.S. Department of Labor, rather than individual states, responsibility for the plans.

Employers, employer groups, and health care providers and administrators contend that successful government efforts to circumvent ERISA preemption would make health care benefits more expensive and difficult to provide.

Minnesota officials have been trying to enforce the Minnesota Pharmacy Benefit Manager Licensure and Regulation Act of 2019, a law that makes it difficult for an employer to exclude many pharmacies from its pharmacy network, either to control costs or to address quality concerns, ERISA says Industry Committee and the other plaintiffs.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce “has asserted authority to apply the (PBM) Act not only to benefit plans offered and insurance policies sold within the state, but also to plans and policies that are located entirely outside of Minnesota and have no meaningful connection to the state “” say the plaintiffs