“Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”
Since issued in 1984, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council became one of the most cited cases in American law, as precedent for 70 Supreme Court decisions and 17,000 decisions in the lower courts. Chevron held that courts must defer to regulatory agencies to interpret ambiguous laws and provided a convenient means for judges to clear their dockets.
The Good: Given the heavy regulation healthcare plans face, most of which comes from agency interpretations of existing laws, the overturn of Chevron means that healthcare plans will have greater latitude and greater success in challenging those agency interpretations.
The Bad: Chevron’s overturn could also mean conflicting decisions in lower courts as to whether the agency interpretation is accurate. For healthcare plans that operate nationally, this could increase compliance costs as well as cause disparate treatment for plan members living in different judicial districts.
Read the full opinion at the link below: