Manatt Health Partner Julian Polaris was quoted in a Bloomberg Law article discussing the legal challenges that agencies, especially the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), are facing after the overturning of Chevron.
With the end of Chevron, which previously deferred to agencies for interpretations of unclear federal laws, hospitals are filing lawsuits against CMS, particularly surrounding Medicare reimbursement policies and how the agency’s definitions of federal payment law could negatively affect their finances. A recent Supreme Court decision, which ruled that health care providers can now challenge a regulation six years from when they suffered an injury rather than from when the regulation was issued, paved the way for litigants to challenge determinations made prior to when agencies were given more interpretative discretion in court, according to Polaris.
“Agencies were much more comfortable with Chevron deference,” Polaris said. “They weren’t issuing the same kinds of lengthy preambles to their rules where they exhaustively went through the public comments and gave lengthy recitations of their own statutory authority.”
Read the full article here.