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Unable to muster support for its position in the statutory text or structure, the government encourages us to look elsewhere. It begins by inviting us to follow it into the legislative history lurking behind the Medicare Act. “But legislative history is not the law.” Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 584 U. S. ___, ___ (2018) (slip op., at 23). And even those of us who believe that clear legislative history can “illuminate ambiguous text” won’t allow “ambiguous legislative history to muddy clear statutory language.” Milner v. Department of Navy, 562 U. S. 562, 572 (2011). Yet the text before us clearly forecloses the government’s position in this case, and the legislative history presented to us is ambiguous at best.

The government points us first to a conference report on the 1986 bill that adopted §1395hh(b). The 1986 report opined that the bill adopted at that time wouldn’t require notice and comment for interpretive rules. See H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 99–1012, p. 311 (1986). But the 1986 bill didn’t include the statutory language at issue here. Congress added that language only the following year, when it enacted §1395hh(a)(2). Nor does the government try to explain how a report on a 1986 bill sheds light on the meaning of statutory terms first introduced in 1987. If anything, the fact that Congress revisited the statute in 1987 may suggest it wasn’t satisfied with the 1986 notice-and-comment requirements and wished to enhance them. Some legislative history even says as much. See H. R. Rep. No. 100–391(I), p. 430 (1987) (expressing concern that, despite the 1986 legislation, the agency was still announcing “important policies” without notice and comment).

The conference report on the 1987 bill that did adopt the statutory language before us today doesn’t offer much help to the government either. The House version of the bill would have required notice and comment for rules with a