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The Senate yesterday passed a bill to avert a partial government shutdown as Congress raced one day before its spending deadline to send President Biden stopgap legislation to fund federal agencies through early March, the New York Times reported. The 77-to-18 vote cleared the way for a vote in the House later Thursday on the measure, which would provide lawmakers more time to pass spending bills totaling $1.66 trillion to fund the government through the fall, the level Democrats and Republicans agreed upon this month. That plan would hold most federal spending steady while bolstering the military. The stopgap legislation “will give Congress time to continue working on the appropriations process to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said. House leaders announced they would take up the measure and quickly pass it in a vote expected by evening, as lawmakers rushed to leave Washington before a predicted snowstorm that they worried could ground flights and strand them in the capital for the weekend. The action in Congress would clear the measure for Mr. Biden, who is expected to quickly sign it before the midnight deadline on Friday. It would mark the third time since the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1 that Congress has extended spending on a temporary basis. Lawmakers in both parties hope it will be the last, and that Congress can finish up its spending business for the year by the beginning of March.

The Senate yesterday took the first step toward passing a bill to keep the government funded into March, as leadership pushes for final passage in the days ahead to prevent a shutdown this weekend, The Hill reported. The upper chamber voted 68-13 to invoke cloture on a motion to proceed to a vehicle for a two-step stopgap, also known as a continuing resolution (CR). The vote clears the first procedural hurdle for the stopgap measure, just days after both sides announced a deal to prevent shutdown over the weekend. Under the deal, which was unveiled on Sunday, both sides agreed to extend funding for four of the 12 annual funding bills through March 1, while negotiators try to hash out new spending levels for fiscal 2024. That includes dollars for agencies like the Departments of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, Energy, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. Lawmakers would extend funding for the remaining eight bills through March 8 under the deal, however. Agencies funded by those bills include the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

A law designed to protect patients from surprise medical bills is contributing to the financial distress of some medical-service providers, which say lengthy billing disputes and payment delays with insurers are hurting their ability to stay afloat, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The No Surprises Act, which took effect last year, aims to protect patients from surprise medical bills from out-of-network healthcare providers when there are disagreements over reimbursements between insurers and providers. Previously, providers often billed patients to make up for the amounts insurers were unwilling to pay. Numerous healthcare businesses, some owned by private equity, said the legislation is contributing to delays and reductions in payments by insurance companies, hurting their cash flows and earnings. A handful of major healthcare-service providers already have filed for chapter 11 protection this year, specifically naming the law as a major reason for their bankruptcies. These include physician-staffing companies Envision Healthcare and American Physician Partners as well as helicopter-ambulance operator Air Methods. The federal law removed patients from having to deal with payment disagreements but pitted healthcare providers against private insurers, leading to more than 489,000 claim disputes in an arbitration system from April 2022 until July 2023, according to the most recent data available. The number of disagreements submitted in the portal’s first year of operations is 14 times greater than what the U.S. Departments of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services had expected to receive in an entire calendar year, according to a government filing.