It’s January 1. Do you know what your formula is?

The Department of Health & Human Services promulgated a new Medicare regulation about compensation for inpatient psychiatric facilities. It established a formula to run from January 1 of one year to January 1 of the next. For 364 days of the year, that worked well enough, but the confusion about what formula applied on January 1 led to litigation. Relying on the concept that a court should “attempt to reconcile . . . competing provisions in a manner that gives effect to each one”–which at times may require it to “dishonor some bit of text” as a preferred alternative to “apply[ing] the unintelligibility canon . . . and . . . deny[ing] effect to both provisions”–the Fifth Circuit concluded that the new year formula would apply on January 1: “That is what context indicates. It is what the agency proposes.” Greenbrier Hospitall, L.L.C. v. Azar, No. 19-30331 (Sept. 9, 2020).