WASHINGTON—The U.S. Supreme Court, without comment, declined Monday to review and let stand a federal appeals court ruling that upheld San Francisco's controversial health care spending law.

The San Francisco law, which took effect in 2008, requires employers with at least 100 employees to spend $1.96 per hour per covered employee on health care, while employers with between 20 and 99 employees must spend at least $1.31 an hour on health care. The requirement applies to employees working at least eight hours per week.

That spending requirement can be satisfied in various ways, including paying employees' health insurance premiums and contributions to health savings accounts and health reimbursement arrangements.

The San Francisco law, challenged by a local restaurant trade association, attracted national attention among employer groups that feared the law would lead other cities and states to pass care health care spending measures and result in multistate employers having to comply with a hodgepodge of health care benefit requirements.

But the interest of states and cities in such approaches cooled since enactment this year of federal health care reform legislation which includes new programs to provide subsidized health insurance coverage to the lower-income uninsured.

Last year, the Supreme Court asked the U.S. Department of Justice for its opinion on whether the high court should review the decision by appeals court. When the case was before the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Bush administration said the law ran afoul of a provision in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act that pre-empts state and local laws and rules that relate to employee benefit plans. The 9th Circuit upheld the law in 2008.

But in a brief filed in May by Acting Justice Department Solicitor General Neal Kumar Katyal and other attorneys at the Justice and Labor Departments, the Obama administration said the Labor Department began to “re-examine” its views.

The brief noted that since that ruling, the federal health care reform law “significantly reduces the potential that state or local governments will choose to enact health care programs” like San Francisco's and “may also affect the question whether such programs are pre-empted by federal law,” the brief said.

Just as the Labor Department has decided that regulatory action on the pre-emption issue is premature, the Supreme Court's “review of the issue is not warranted at this time,” the brief said.