Within a few weeks, the Supreme Court is likely to issue a ruling in two cases overturning or limiting the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, which instructs courts to defer to “reasonable” federal agency statutory interpretations. Some commentators predict that such a ruling would result in disaster. Don’t believe them.
Health has historically been the province of state and local governments. Yet federal agencies now either spend money or issue regulations worth trillions of health dollars annually. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services runs public insurance programs that cover more than a third of people insured in the U.S.; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates more than 20,000 drugs, 6,500 medical devices, and 100,000 tobacco products; and the Department of Veterans Affairs runs the Veterans Health Administration, the nation’s largest integrated health-care system, which operates 1,321 facilities and serves more than 9 million veterans.
The Chevron doctrine—set out in the 1984 ruling in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC—increased the level of deference accorded to federal agencies to interpret statutes and make regulations. The doctrine applies a two-step test. The first step asks whether Congress’s intent “is clear” and “unambiguously expressed.”
