Supreme Court removes Medicaid argument from March calendar News
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Supreme Court removes Medicaid argument from March calendar

The Supreme Court issued Thursday a one-line docket entry removing two consolidated Medicaid cases from its March argument calendar.

The two cases, Azar v. Gresham and Arkansas v. Gresham, had to do with a Trump administration policy that allowed states to impose work requirements for Medicaid recipients as long as the states sought the approval of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Residents of Kentucky and Arkansas sued in district court against the policy, claiming that Alex Azar, Trump’s Secretary of HHS, had acted in “an arbitrary and capricious manner” when he approved the work requirements in those states.

In February, acting solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar submitted a motion to the Supreme Court citing “greatly changed circumstances” and asked the court to vacate the lower court judgments and remand the issue to HHS. She noted that HHS “has begun a process of determining whether to withdraw approval of those requirements,” and that it no longer makes sense for the Court to take up the issue. President Biden has signaled that he intends to roll back the Trump-era Medicaid work requirements.

However, Arkansas’s attorney general, Leslie Rutledge, filed an opposition to the motion to vacate the cases. Because the Biden administration has not yet formally revoked the work requirement policy, Rutledge argued that the cases are not moot and the Court should hear them. While the Court has removed the cases from its docket, it has not followed through on the other part of Prelogar’s motion to vacate the lower court judgments.