Laws & Policies
Sixty pinned sources. Every rule in the model traces to one of them, and every one of them is cached, hashed and re-verified on a cadence rather than assumed to still say what it said.
The corpus
The law is the specification. So the law is version-controlled.
Adding or changing a source is treated as a change to the legal basis of the rules, and requires approval accordingly. Each entry records where it came from, what it covers, when it was retrieved, which issue or edition it is, and a hash — so months later anyone can prove the text a rule was built from has not quietly moved.
The oldest and the newest
Fifty-eight years apart, and both of them still deciding cases.
1968 — the provision that outlived its own subject
The oldest still-operative text in the corpus is a Medicaid subsection added on 2 January 1968. It caps a state's medically-needy income standard at 133⅓% of the highest payment under a federal cash-assistance program.
That program was abolished in 1996. The paragraph has never been amended. The implementing regulation says “exceeds the following amounts” and then enumerates nothing — while two later paragraphs cite the missing items.
The model does not guess. It computes the ceiling the moment a base is supplied, and says plainly that the base cannot be derived from live law. The question that leaves — what base do states apply today, and on what authority? — is one we ask, not one we answer.
2026 — law that arrived while the model was being built
At the newest edge: an interim final rule effective 31 July 2026 amending three separate parts of the federal regulations at once, the 2026 poverty guidelines published in January, a January 2026 federal standards chart, and a statutory text bounded at a public law of July 2026.
The corpus also tracks law that is enacted but not yet operative — provisions applicable to tax years after 2026, home-equity caps arriving in 2028, an option a state may exercise from mid-2028. Knowing what is coming is part of knowing what is current.
Currency is tested, not assumed
Two live examples. A widely used federal “official dataset” for state standards was measured five years stale and divergent from the same agency's own published tables — so it was not relied on. And the core federal regulations were proved byte-identical to the live electronic register at the time of build. One source failed the check and one passed it; both results are on the record.
Grouped by program family
What is actually in the corpus.
Statutes, regulations, agency guidance and published tables — plus a complete state layer for New York. The federal work is done once and shared across all five program families; the state layer is where a new jurisdiction's effort goes.
Medicaid and CHIP
- 42 CFR Part 435, Subpart J eligibility process; the MAGI methodology; streamlined determinations
- 42 CFR 435.110 / .116 / .118 / .119 / .150 the eligibility groups — parents and caretakers, pregnant women, infants and children, the adult group, former foster care
- 42 CFR 435.403, 435.406, 435.956 residency, citizenship and verification
- 42 CFR Part 457 the Children's Health Insurance Program
- 8 USC 1612, 1613 the five-year bar on federal benefits
- 8 USC 1641 the definition of “qualified alien”
- 29 USC 206 the federal minimum wage, where eligibility tests reference it
- 28 CFR 35.108 the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act
- Federal eligibility standards tables published state-by-state Medicaid and CHIP income standards
- Federal MAGI conversion results the converted standards for the state layer
The Exchange, premium tax credits and the Basic Health Program
- 45 CFR Part 155, Subpart D exchange eligibility determinations
- 26 USC 36B the premium tax credit statute, as amended
- 26 CFR 1.36B-0 to 1.36B-6 the premium tax credit regulations
- 26 USC 5000A minimum essential coverage
- 26 CFR 1.5000A-0 to 1.5000A-5 the coverage regulations
- 42 CFR Part 600 the Basic Health Program
SNAP
- 7 CFR Part 271 general provisions and definitions
- 7 CFR Part 273 certification of eligible households — income, deductions, resources, work requirements
- 7 USC 2012, 2014, 2015 definitions, income and deductions, and the conditions of participation
- 7 USC 2017 the value of the allotment
- Federal fiscal-year tables the thrifty food plan cost and maximum allotments, published annually
WIC, school meals and Summer EBT
- 42 USC 1786 the Child Nutrition Act section that creates WIC
- 7 CFR Part 246 the WIC regulations, including certification and nutritional risk
- 42 USC 1758 the National School Lunch Act section on free and reduced-price eligibility
- 7 CFR Part 245 determining eligibility for free and reduced-price meals
- 42 USC 1762 the Summer EBT statute
- 7 CFR Part 292 the Summer EBT regulations
- Annual income eligibility guidelines the published school-meal income thresholds
Medicare Savings Programs
- 42 USC 1396d(p), (s) the qualified and specified low-income beneficiary definitions
- 42 USC 1396u-3 the qualifying individual selection rules
- 42 USC 1395w-114(a)(3) the Part D low-income subsidy thresholds and their indexing
- 42 CFR 423.772 low-income subsidy definitions
- 42 USC 1382 the supplemental security income resource base
- 42 USC 1382a, 1382b how income and resources are counted and excluded
- 20 CFR Part 416, Subpart L the resource-counting regulations
- 42 CFR Parts 406, 407 Medicare entitlement and state buy-in
- Federal dual-eligible standards chart the published annual income and resource standards
Non-MAGI Medicaid — long-term care, spend-down and transfers
- 42 USC 1396p liens, estate recovery, asset transfers and the look-back period
- 42 USC 1396r-5 spousal impoverishment protections and their indexing
- 42 USC 1396b federal payment limits, including the medically-needy ceiling
- 42 USC 1396n home and community-based services waivers
- 42 USC 1382c the aged, blind and disabled definitions, and the deeming base
- 42 USC 1382j deeming from a sponsor
- 8 USC 1631 the federal sponsor-deeming rules
- 8 USC 1183a the affidavit of support
- 8 USC 1645 qualifying quarters of coverage
- Federal program guidance the state classification for eligibility determination arrangements
Poverty guidelines and cross-cutting law
- Annual poverty guidelines the current year's guidelines and the register notice that published them
- Historical poverty guidelines the register notice for every year from 1983 — 44 years of cited history
- 42 USC 1396a state plan requirements
- 42 CFR Part 431, Subpart E fair hearings and notices
New York — the state layer, worked end to end
- Statute NY Social Services Law §366 Medicaid eligibility
- Statute NY Social Services Law §363-c Medicaid management
- Statute NY Social Services Law §367-a the state's Medicare Savings Program definitions
- Statute NY Social Services Law §369-gg the state's Basic Health Program
- Statute NY Public Health Law §§2510–2511 the state's children's health program
- Instrument State Plan — eligibility pages the federally approved eligibility pages
- Instrument MAGI verification plan the approved verification procedures
- Amendment Non-MAGI methodologies and spend-down an approved state plan amendment setting the medically-needy levels
- Amendment Non-MAGI resource standards the current and superseded resource standards
Why one state, deeply
All fifty-one jurisdictions carried. One of them worked all the way down.
Every jurisdiction's published federal-source values are already in the model, with per-cell provenance. But depth is a function of law, not of effort: New York is encoded end to end because New York's own statutes, State Plan and amendments are in the corpus. That is the pattern the next state follows — and because the fifty federal sources are shared, the new work is the state layer alone.
A state's own instruments can disagree, and we will not pick a winner
One state's approved instruments state two different income levels — and the arithmetic behind each is exact to its own published figures. The model declares both and prefers neither, so the standard, the excess, the spend-down and the eligibility date stay honestly unanswerable until the state's policy authority says which instrument governs. That is a question we surface, not one we quietly resolve.