T hrough the early 1990s, this dispute raged between state victim compensation programs and major federal benefit programs. State laws said that comp. was the payer of last resort; but so did all the federal programs’ laws. At that time, there was nothing in the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) that addressed this problem.
A situation in which two laws say opposing things is called a “conflict in law,” and it’s not uncommon.
There are well-settled though sometimes complicated rules and decisions governing these disputes – in fact,
“conflict in law” is an entire course in itself in the law school curriculum.
One of those rules is that federal law generally is supreme over state law. The states cannot legislate themselves out of mandates or provisions in federal law, so long as those provisions are constitutional; otherwise the American system of federal, state, and local laws would be completely chaotic.
So, when state compensation programs came up against last-payer provisions in federal benefit programs, they lost. The states were forced to pay first, even if the victim was eligible for Medicaid, or V.A. benefits, or Social Security. Some states resisted this – there were several cases in which the Veterans
Administration filed suit against victim compensation programs after the states refused to pay bills generated by V.A. hospitals. What made these bills particularly galling was that the V.A. wasn’t even presenting the bill to the victim–the victim wasn’t even required to pay–but the V.A. law allowed it to go after third parties like victim compensation. The states lost every one of these V.A. cases, because federal law controlled.
While there were relatively few V.A. cases to deal with, a bigger problem was Medicaid – and it was in the early 1990s that this federal behemoth began discovering victim compensation. This truly was a budget-breaker: There were far more people on the
Medicaid rolls who could become victims, and if compensation programs had to assume responsibility for bills that would otherwise be paid by Medicaid, they could be in deep trouble.
Recognizing that the only solution for states was to gain protection in the federal code, the Association sought a change to VOCA that specifically addressed this conflict in law. In 1994, Congress responded by adopting what became 42 U.S. Code section 10602(e):
(e) Relationship to certain Federal programs.
Notwithstanding any other law, if the compensation paid by an eligible crime victim compensation program
[note: this means eligible for a VOCA grant] would cover costs that a Federal program, or a federal financed State or local program, would otherwise pay,-
(1) such crime victim compensation program shall not pay that compensation; and
(2) the other program shall make its payments without regard to the existence of the crime victim compensation program.
This language is quite straightforward – the crime victim compensation program “shall not pay” when a federal program could, and the federal program should act as if the compensation program didn’t even exist.
But Congress made itself even more perfectly clear in the House Judiciary Committee Report that accompanied the change in law:
It is the intent of the Committee that compensation programs funded under this Act [VOCA] be available as “funds of last resort,” and thus not supplant
Medicaid, Veterans Administration, CHAMPUS,
Indian Health Services, or similarly available Federal funds.
But now there was a conflict in federal law – VOCA said the state compensation programs were payers of last resort, but the federal benefit programs’ laws said the same thing about those programs. Congress hadn’t bothered to change the laws specifically authorizing and governing the federal benefit programs. What happens when there is a conflict like this?
The accepted rule to settle this conflict says you look to the latest and most specific law on a certain subject to determine the outcome. In this instance,
Congress was specifically speaking to a situation or problem, and its pronouncement was clear. Also, since this law was adopted in 1994, it was more recent than the last-payer provisions in the federal benefit programs’ laws.
So the matter was settled. However, since local administrators of federal benefit programs look at their own laws, rather than VOCA, when running their programs, individual problems still do crop up. Many states find that providing the official with the VOCA statutory language and the committee report usually resolves the problem. VOCA could not be clearer – you are the last payer.