It was a busy year for health-related cases at the Supreme Court. Among other issues, the justices grappled with two abortion cases, a separate case touching on the opioid epidemic, and a case challenging whether localities can bar homeless people from sleeping in public spaces.
Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of KFF Health News' weekly health policy news podcast, "What the Health?" A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book " Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z," now in its third edition.
Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, about whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act requirement that hospitals participating in Medicare provide the care needed to stabilize a patient's condition overrides Idaho's near-complete abortion ban when a pregnant patient experiences a medical emergency.Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, about whether federal bankruptcy law can shield an entity from future claims without the consent of all claimants.
If you're a regular listener, you'll remember that the week of Memorial Day we did a roundup of the health policy-related Supreme Court cases whose decisions we expected to come in June. Well, now it's the week of July Fourth, and we're going to follow up and talk about how those cases got resolved. We are pleased to welcome back to the podcast Sarah Somers, legal director of the National Health Law Program.
Rovner: So what kind of health issues are we most concerned about here that we would now not necessarily be giving deference to the administrative agency? Somers: I think that's absolutely true. And I already think the agencies are quite cautious because they're always vulnerable to challenge under the Administrative Procedure Act. But this is just going to turn up the heat several notches and keep them out of areas that they really are very much needed, where their expertise and their experience is needed. I think that's absolutely true.
Somers: Yes. And let me just comment for a second on what Justice Roberts said, which is that, oh, this doesn't mean that cases decided under Chevron aren't good law anymore. In order to disrupt that you'd need some kind of special factors or special consideration. As Justice Kagan pointed out, we don't know what that would look like and anybody can come up with a special reason, an important reason it should be overturned.
And so, sure enough, the states are waiting in the wings to bring it up themselves and argue anew that they're the ones who are being harmed by it. So it's an undead kind of issue, and it's almost certain to come back and haunt us. Somers: What EMTALA is is a very important federal law that says that hospitals have to provide necessary stabling treatment to people who arrive in an emergency medical condition. And this means not just treatment to save somebody's life, but also to prevent any kind of serious impairment to bodily functions or great pain or serious dysfunction or other types of jeopardy.
Somers: Exactly. Federal law preempts state law, and it shouldn't be a hard question. It's the kind of thing that 10 years ago, regardless of Dobbs would not have been a closed question. Somers: Yeah. A federal law could be passed if Congress was all Republican and Trump was president. There are all kinds of things that they could do through this. They could try to amend EMTALA. Who knows the mischief they could get into, the policymakers?
Somers: Yes, questions were raised about the settlement. This is a huge settlement, billions of dollars on behalf of all the people who died and suffered from addiction because of the drugs that were being prescribed at a time when people weren't aware of how addictive they were. The majority said that the settlement was not adequate to protect debtors or even the creditors and other victims.
Rovner: Finally, the court ruled in a case out of Grants Pass, Oregon, that cities can enforce bans against sleeping in public even if the sleepers have no homes and no other access to shelter. This is also kind of health care-adjacent but could have repercussions, right?
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