Opinion of the Court
argument. But as the government knows well, courts aren’t free to rewrite clear statutes under the banner of our own policy concerns. If the government doesn’t like Congress’s notice-and-comment policy choices, it must take its complaints there. See, e.g., Henson v. Santander Consumer USA Inc., 582 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2017) (slip op., at 9–10); Sebelius v. Cloer, 569 U. S. 369, 381 (2013). Besides, the government’s policy arguments don’t carry much force even on their own terms. The government warns that providing the public with notice and a chance to comment on all Medicare interpretive rules, like those in its roughly 6,000-page “Provider Reimbursement Manual,” would take “ ‘many years’ ” to complete. Brief for Petitioner 18, 42. But the dissent points to only eight manual provisions that courts have deemed interpretive over the last four decades, see post, at 10–12, and the government hasn’t suggested that providing notice and comment for these or any other specific manual provisions would prove excessively burdensome. Nor has the government identified any court decision invalidating a manual provision under §1395hh(a)(2) in the nearly two years since the court of appeals issued its opinion in this case. For their part, the hospitals claim that only a few dozen pages of the Provider Reimbursement Manual might even arguably require notice and comment. Tr. of Oral Arg. 49– 51. And they tell us that the agency regularly and without much difficulty undertakes notice-and-comment rulemaking for many other decisions affecting the Medicare program. See Brief for Respondents 58; App. to Brief in Opposition 1a–3a. The government hasn’t rebutted any of these points.
Not only has the government failed to document any draconian costs associated with notice and comment, it also has neglected to acknowledge the potential countervailing benefits. Notice and comment gives affected parties fair warning of potential changes in the law and an
