District Memorial Hospital of Southwestern North Carolina, Inc. v. Thompson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 federal appellate · 2 district ·

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “In considering the Secretary’s construction of [a regulation], we give “substantial deference to [the] agency’s interpretation of its own regulations.” Thomas Jefferson Univ. v. Shalala, 512 U.S. at 512 , 114 S.Ct. 2381 . More precisely, “the agency’s interpretation must be given ‘controlling weight unless it is plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.’ ” Id. (quoting Udall v. Tollman, 380 U.S. 1, 16-17 , 85 S.Ct. 792 , 13 L.Ed.2d 616 (1965) (other citations omitted)). Indeed, the Supreme Court has noted that deference to the Secretary’s interpretations of Medicare regulations is “all the more warranted,” because Medicare is “ ‘a complex and highly technical regulatory program,’ in which the identification and classification of relevant ‘criteria necessarily require significant expertise and entail the exercise of judgment grounded in policy concerns.’ ” Id. (quoting Pauley v. BethEnergy Mines, Inc., 501 U.S. 680, 697 , 111 S.Ct. 2524 , 115 L.Ed.2d 604 (1991)). The agency’s interpretation “need not be the best or most natural one by grammatical or other standards.” Pauley, 501 U.S. at 702 , 111 S.Ct. 2524 . Rather, it need only be “a reasonable construction of the regulatory language.” Thomas Jefferson Univ., 512 U.S. at 506 , 114 S.Ct. 2381 (emphasis added).”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. West Virginia Department of Health & Human Resources v. United States Department of Health & Human Services