The Supreme Court’s ruling could complicate CMS’s efforts to regulate hospices

Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court will make it harder for agencies like the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to regulate health care providers.

The 6-3 ruling overturned a 1984 decision that established the “Chevron doctrine,” which requires lower courts to defer to executive branch agencies to resolve ambiguities in laws passed by Congress. Historically, the doctrine has been used to uphold numerous federal laws in the face of legal challenges.

Chief Justice John Roberts indicated in the decision that federal judges “must exercise independent judgment in deciding whether an agency acted within its statutory authority.”

According to Roberts, however, the ruling does not invalidate earlier cases that invoked the Chevron doctrine.

The case that led to this decision began with a group of fishermen who challenged regulations requiring them to pay independent regulators to monitor their catches.

The ruling could open the door to legal challenges to a range of federal laws, including environmental, health care, food and workplace safety, among many others. The case also represents a significant shift in power from the executive branch to the judiciary.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the dissent, said the decision represented a rollback of the agency’s authority “despite congressional direction to the contrary.”

“Congress knows that it does not—indeed, cannot—write wholly complete regulatory statutes,” she wrote. “It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other entity will have to resolve, and gaps that some other entity will have to fill. And it would generally prefer that entity to be the responsible agency, not the court.”