It’s Friday when we talk with journalists on The Spark. We were joined by two reporters who are new to covering the State Capitol in Pennsylvania – WITF’s Ben Wasserstein and LNP/Lancaster Online’s Jaxon White.

The state's fiscal year began July 1. After appearing to be on track for passage by that deadline, an impasse ensued when Senate Republicans said Gov. Josh Shapiro reneged on a promise to include a $100 million voucher program to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. White said lawmakers still have to pass "code bills" in order to finalize the spending plan and there's some question as whether vouchers will once again become an issue,"Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman said that they were basically looking for any avenue possible to get the voucher program through, but he did not mention the code bills to make that clear. But my question was about the code bills when he said that he would explore other avenues. So it's up in the air whether they're going to try."

The State Senate returns to session next week.

The Pennsylvania General Assembly is also considering moving the 2024 primary election (a presidential election year) from its scheduled date of April 23 to earlier in the month. Wassenstein indicated the Jewish observance of Passover is one of the reasons,"This would also give Pennsylvania a bigger say in who is the nominee. Considering that Pennsylvania is the largest swing state, I believe at this point now that Florida is red. So this would give a bigger say, especially since elections tend to come down to Pennsylvania in a lot of regards. So having an early say on who gets the nomination would be beneficial to Pennsylvania. But on top of that, it would be more equitable for the Jewish people."

Wasserstein pointed out lawmakers will have to move quickly to change the date and one of the considerations is candidates have enough time to circulate nominating petitions to run for office in 2024.

Wasserstein has reported on a move in the legislature to regulate how much health insurance companies can use artificial intelligence when deciding on claims, "Some insurance companies, Cigna, for example, has an algorithm that can go through tons of claims and deny them in 1.2 seconds. And it has been exposing certain biases based on sex and race. And that is something that legislators are trying to take a look at because it could potentially mean life or death for some people. So they want to have a human voice and not be solely relying on the technology. And AI is becoming a pretty bipartisan issue."

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