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Last week, lawmakers raced to find a funding deal to avert a government shutdown, and they’ll be back in a few weeks to do it all over again. ... Spending fights will likely take up much of the time before the 114th Congress wraps up. But the GOP leaders in both chambers also expressed interest in passing a 21st Century Cures Act during the lame-duck. The measure is aimed at promoting medical research and developing innovative medical solutions. The bill “could end up being the most significant piece of legislation we pass in the whole Congress,” [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell said. (Bowman, 10/6)

The leaders of nearly two dozen healthcare industry organizations want Congress to continue to push for lifting an 18-year-old ban that prevents HHS from developing a national patient identifier. ... Providers and other users of electronic health records now often use a technique called probabilistic matching. It matches patients to their electronic records using mathematical algorithms that take basic demographic data in those records, such as first and last names, date of birth and sex, and calculates the probability the patient's records being queried belong to the patient seeking care. (Conn, 10/6)

Federal lawmakers will continue to rail against the high cost of prescription drugs in the next few years, but their most likely actions will be limited to relatively small steps such as the enactment of measures intended to approve more generics. “There is not going to be a magic bullet," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who now leads the conservative American Action Forum. “There are a bunch of little levers they can pull.” (Dooley Young, 10/6)

House Democrats on Thursday wrote to the National Hockey League to press the organization to take steps to reduce head injuries in the sport. The lawmakers pointed to studies showing the danger of head injuries due to physical contact in the normal course of a hockey game and that such hits to the head can have long-term effects like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease more commonly known as CTE. (Sullivan, 10/6)