Opinion ID: 655359
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Failure to Consider Important Evidence.

Text: 42 Finally, Samaritan argues that the Secretary's regulation is contrary to the rulemaking record because she ignored three reports. Two of the reports, one by the General Accounting Office and the other by the Regional Administrators' Task Force on Sole Community Hospital Exemptions, predated the 1983 statutory amendments. These commentators criticized the Secretary's prior twenty-five mile rule and her emphasis on distance and other physical factors. These criticisms were rejected by Congress in the 1983 amendments and thus cannot be used to attack the Secretary's regulations implementing those amendments. 43 The third report was authored by the Prospective Payment Assessment Commission, an advisory group responsible for annually submitting recommended PPS changes to the Secretary. See 42 U.S.C. § 1395ww(e)(2). The Commission's 1988 report suggested that the Secretary's SCH criteria may be too restrictive. However, the Secretary specifically responded to this and other criticisms in her later rulemakings. See 54 Fed.Reg. 36481-83; 54 Fed.Reg. 19650-51. Having examined these responses, we cannot conclude that the Secretary's reasoning is so implausible that it could not be ... the product of agency expertise. Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass'n, 463 U.S. at 43, 103 S.Ct. at 2867. 44 For all of the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the Secretary was not arbitrary and capricious and acted in accordance with law in denying Samaritan's application for SCH designation because Samaritan does not meet the criteria in 42 C.F.R. § 412.92(a)(3). The judgment of the district court is therefore affirmed. 45