Cite as: 529 U. S. 1 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
haustion). Indeed, in this very case, the Seventh Circuit held that several of respondent's claims were not ripe and remanded for ripeness review of the remainder. 143 F. 3d, at 1077-1078. Doctrines of "ripeness" and "exhaustion" contain exceptions, however, which exceptions permit early review when, for example, the legal question is "fit" for resolution and delay means hardship, see Abbott Laboratories, supra, at 148-149, or when exhaustion would prove "futile," see McCarthy v. Madigan, 503 U. S. 140, 147-148 (1992); McKart, supra, at 197-201. (And sometimes Congress expressly authorizes preenforcement review, though not here. See, e. g., 15 U. S. C. § 2618(a)(1)(A) (Toxic Substances Control Act).)
Insofar as § 405(h) prevents application of the "ripeness" and "exhaustion" exceptions, i. e., insofar as it demands the "channeling" of virtually all legal attacks through the agency, it assures the agency greater opportunity to apply, interpret, or revise policies, regulations, or statutes without possibly premature interference by different individual courts applying "ripeness" and "exhaustion" exceptions case by case. But this assurance comes at a price, namely, occasional individual, delay-related hardship. In the context of a massive, complex health and safety program such as Medicare, embodied in hundreds of pages of statutes and thousands of pages of often interrelated regulations, any of which may become the subject of a legal challenge in any of several different courts, paying this price may seem justified. In any event, such was the judgment of Congress as understood in Salfi and Ringer. See Ringer, supra, at 627; Salfi, supra, at 762.
Despite the urging of the Council and supporting amici, we cannot distinguish Salfi and Ringer from the case before us. Those cases themselves foreclose distinctions based upon the "potential future" versus the "actual present" nature of the claim, the "general legal" versus the "factspecific" nature of the challenge, the "collateral" versus
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