Congress passed a continuing resolution Wednesday night, funding and reopening the government through January 30, 2026. The bill did not extend the ACA subsidies, but includes a number of provisions impacting healthcare providers:
- A temporary extension of pandemic era telehealth flexibilities that expired on September 30th, including:
- Removing geographic limitations for medical telehealth services.
- Extending telehealth services for federally qualified health centers and rural health clinic.
- Expanding practitioners eligible to provide telehealth services to include physical therapists, occupational therapists and speech-language pathologists.
- Delaying Medicare in-person requirements for mental health services furnished through telehealth or audio-only telecommunications technology.
- Allowing for non- behavioral/mental health services to be provided through two-way, real-time audio-only communication technology
- Restoring the use of telehealth to conduct face-to-face encounters for Hospice recertification purposes.
- An extension of CMS’s Hospital-at-Home programs that lapsed on October 1, 2025.
- Restoration of the 1.0 work geographic index floor. Without the ongoing extension, the Work GPCI would drop below 1.0 for several states, resulting in a significant reduction in Medicare payment for physician services. This is effective retroactively from October 1, 2025 through January 30, 2026.
- Extension of funding for quality measure endorsement, input, and selection.
The continuing resolution will also wipe the current statutory PAYGO scorecard for this legislative session, preventing any statutory 4% PAYGO sequestration cuts to Medicare looming after H.R.1 passed in July.
Now that the bill has been signed into law, agencies, including CMS and HRSA will resume full operations. During the shutdown, functions including rulemaking, review of deferred survey components, review of deficiency findings and enforcement actions, Medicare certifications for new facilities, including initial surveys, and quality rating system updates. While the bill requires all layoff notices issued since October 1, 2025 to be rescinded and positions be restored with back-pay, the 43-day shutdown resulted in a backlog of functions that are expected to result in continued delays in CMS and HRSA processing and operations.
If you have any questions or would like to further discuss the impact of the continuing resolution on your organization, please reach out to Advis at (708) 478-7030 to contact our experts.
Published November 13, 2025
