It may just turn out that New Yorkers can thank a federal judge in Maryland for saving them from their own city council. Judge J. Frederick Motz this week struck down Maryland’s “Fair Share Act,” a law that required any private company employing more than 10,000 workers to spend at least 8% of its salary expenditures on health insurance or write a check to the state for the difference. Only four private employers in Maryland are that large and three of them secured what amounted to exemptions, so the law was clearly targeted at Wal-Mart. Sound familiar? The Maryland law resembles New York City’s own anti-Wal-Mart ordinance, a fact Judge Motz could see from hundreds of miles away. With luck, the New York law will meet the same fate.

Judge Motz ruled that the Maryland Law runs afoul of the federal Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which limits states’ ability to meddle in employee benefits. Congress passed ERISA “to avoid a multiplicity of regulation in order to permit the nationally uniform administration of employee benefit plans.” Judge Motz actually cites New York’s law as an example of the situation Congress enacted ERISA to avoid, since the city’s requirements for health insurance spending and its means of redress are different from those of the Maryland law, which are in turn different from a separate law in Suffolk County, and all three current laws are different from the many other anti-Wal-Mart proposals that have popped up in statehouses across the country.

Maryland legislators claimed they were motivated by the strain Wal-Mart’s allegedly underinsured workers put on the state’s Medicaid system. That’s possible, although the push for such legislation is often actually driven by union activists whose attempts at organizing have been resisted by Wal-Mart employees. Taking legislators at their word, however, this ruling is really a sign that lawmakers everywhere will have to find a way of solving the deeper problems in the healthcare system without using big-box retailers as scapegoats.

A former economic adviser to Senator Kerry’s campaign, Jason Furman, has noted that Wal-Mart is more generous than many employers, being one of the few companies to offer health benefits to part-time employees. The percentage of Wal-Mart workers and their children on Medicaid is lower than that for other retailers. To the extent that Wal-Mart employees do end up in government insurance programs, it’s not a corporate decision but an individual choice. If a low-income worker has the choice between more take-home pay and more health insurance and either is effectively tax-free, those workers opt to take the cash instead of losing both the cash and their Medicaid eligibility by taking out private insurance. Laws like those in Maryland and New York only deprive poor people of that choice.

Some politicians, even in New York, recognize that the roots of the healthcare crisis are not to be found in big-box retailers. In vetoing the city’s law, Mayor Bloomberg noted the violation of ERISA spotted by Judge Motz and said the law just wouldn’t work. He predicted instead “a distracting and time-consuming legal fight,” which, sure enough, is what Maryland got. The city council passed the law over the mayor’s veto, and only the absence so far of any discount retailers to complain has spared the city its own lawsuit. It’s still too soon to say exactly how the latest ruling will affect the New York law, but the city council owes it to New Yorkers, especially those on low-incomes, not to wait to find out. If ever there were a time to repeal the anti-Wal-Mart law, it’s now.