The “neediest among us” will suffer due to a new Supreme Court decision, according to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent from the ruling. Joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson said Congress can fix the issue their colleagues caused.
The majority sided Tuesday with federal health officials in a dispute over how much the government pays hospitals that treat a disproportionate share of low-income patients. The majority rejected the hospitals’ appeal in a 7-2 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, involving what the Trump appointee called a “highly technical” issue about calculating payments.
But Jackson said the seemingly narrow issue has high stakes. “The decision the majority has made in this case will deprive hospitals serving the neediest among us of critical federal funds that Congress plainly attempted to provide,” she wrote, joined by Sotomayor.
“Indeed,” she went on, “it is undisputed that systemically undercounting low-income patients for the purposes of the disproportionate-share formula might cause many such hospitals to close their doors entirely, such that patients from our Nation’s poorest communities may not be served at all.”
But the Biden appointee concluded this doesn’t have to be the end of the matter. She called on Congress to step in and “restate its intention that low-income people have access to quality medical care and that hospitals be compensated accordingly.” While the case is important in its own right, it also highlights a long-running dispute over how conservative and liberal jurists approach the interpretation of legal texts. Barrett said the dissent “frames its argument as one primarily about the statute’s purpose and only secondarily about its text,” while Jackson said Congress wouldn’t need to step in “if this Court’s interpretive practices would just take care to evaluate the text of a statute alongside any indisputable legislative objectives.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
Latest Post
Recommended
