Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-1263diff_868c.pdf
Page Number: 31.0

14 

GALLARDO v. MARSTILLER 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

reasoning that the assignment provision’s use of the phrase
“ ‘any rights . . . of the individual’ ” is “most naturally read”
to impose a temporal limitation to rights possessed while on
Medicaid, ante, at 11–12.  Neither party even suggests this 
reading of the statute.4  That is because it is anything but 
natural,  especially  under  the  interpretive  approach  the 
Court uses today.  An “individual” continues to be an “indi-
vidual” for the duration of his or her life, whether on or off 
Medicaid.  Were there any ambiguity, the word “ ‘any,’ ” we 
are told, “ ‘has an expansive meaning’ ” that would counsel 
against the Court’s implicit limitation.  Ante, at 6.  Perhaps
sensing that its claim to natural meaning lacks force, the
Court, at last, acknowledges “background legal principles” 
that militate against allowing a lifetime assignment.  Ante, 
at 12.  While background principles indisputably are rele-
vant, the Court errs by discarding the more relevant back-
ground rule of insurance law that Congress embraced in the 
Act, see supra, at 9, which could have avoided the Court’s 
dilemma altogether.5 

Over the long term, the Court’s alteration of the balance 
Congress  struck  between  preserving  Medicaid’s  status  as
payer of last resort and protecting Medicaid beneficiaries’ 
property  might  frustrate  both  aims.  As  a  State’s  right  of
recovery  from  any  damages  payout  expands,  a  Medicaid 
beneficiary’s  share  shrinks,  reducing  the  beneficiary’s  in-
centive to pursue a tort action in the first place.  See Brief 

—————— 

4 In its briefing, Florida responded to the lifetime-assignment concern
by stating only that its own law did not go so far.  Brief for Respondent
45.  Confronted anew with the concern at argument, Florida proposed an
implicit “germaneness requirement,” see Tr. of Oral Arg. 68–70, which 
the Court does not embrace, see ante, at 12, n. 5. 

5 The Court does not dispute the background principle that an insurer’s
third-party recovery is limited to the elements for which the insurer has 
made payment.  See supra, at 9.  The Court responds, however, that Con-
gress clearly displaced this principle in the assignment provision.  See 
ante, at 8, n. 2.  That, of course, is the entire question.  For the reasons 
explained, the Court’s reading of the assignment provision is erroneous.