424
Souter, J., dissenting
retary has indeed provided for a number of different methods. For instance, under the Secretary's "[d]epartmental method" for apportioning costs, the provider's cost of "routine services" is apportioned between Medicare and non-Medicare patients on an average cost per diem basis, whereas the cost of "ancillary" services is apportioned on the basis of the ratio of Medicare beneficiary charges to total patient charges in each department. See 42 CFR § 413.53(a)(1) (1992). The combined reimbursement for all of the different services performed by a health care provider, as calculated under all of the different methods allowed by the statute and specified in the regulations and other materials published by the Secretary, may aptly be labeled the "aggregate reimbursement."
As I thus read the statute, the term "aggregate" is important in making it clear not only that the "reimbursement" considered in clause (ii) is the total amount received by a provider for all of the services it has rendered to Medicare beneficiaries, but that the amount received should be considered only as a whole. This focus on the total amount received means that a provider who shows that a method results in an understating of the reasonable cost of a particular service will not necessarily be entitled to a "retroactive corrective adjustmen[t]" to recover that particular cost, for the Government may be able to show that the same method, or another method used by the provider, has overstated other costs. (By the same token, of course, the Government will not always deserve an adjustment when it shows that a method has overstated a particular cost.) The text's direction to look only at the total reimbursement also means that the provider will not be entitled to the prospective application of a more accurate method of its own devising, an insight into the statute that is hardly new; as the Court acknowledges, see ante, at 413, we recognized in Bowen v. Georgetown Univ. Hospital, 488 U. S. 204, 211 (1988) (emphasis in original), that "nothing in clause (ii) suggests that it permits
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