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It is dealing with the fate of the health insurance industry’s exemption from Federal anti-trust law-the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945 which granted the exemption in the first place. Its original intent was not to weaken regulation of the insurance industry, but to strengthen it. The act came about as a result of a Supreme court decision, United States V South-Eastern Underwriters Assn. which ruled that insurance companies that sold policies across state lines were engaged in interstate commerce and were thus subject to federal anti-trust law. The original intent of McCarran-Ferguson was to enable the states to tightly regulate the insurance industry. Many states had become concerned that, as a result of the Supreme Court ruling, they no longer had the authority to regulate the insurance industry within their boundaries. It stipulated that no act of Congress could invalidate any state law dealing with the regulation of insurance unless the federal law specifically related to insurance. The Act permitted the federal government to regulate insurance, but it also stipulated that only the states have broad authority to regulate the insurance industry unless the federal government enacts specific legislation intended to regulate insurance and displace state law. In short, it was designed to empower both the federal government and the individual states to keep insurance companies from becoming abusive monopolies. How ironic that it had instead been used to enable the insurance companies to become the abusive monopolies it was intended to prevent.