Good day and welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy’s Daily Briefing. It’s Tuesday, Nov. 28. Today, we write about the No Surprises Act, a law designed to protect patients from surprise medical bills. It is contributing to the financial distress of some medical-service providers as lengthy billing disputes and payment delays with insurers hurt their ability to stay afloat. And conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will need the support of Sandy Hook families to emerge from bankruptcy, lawyers for the families said during a court hearing Monday.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will need the support of Sandy Hook families to emerge from bankruptcy, lawyers for the families said during a court hearing Monday, where the judge set a February date to consider bankruptcy exit plans.

“The Sandy Hook families comprise the vast majority of the creditors in the Jones case. So moving forward with the Jones plan that doesn’t have our support…will be challenging in our view,” said Sara Brauner, a lawyer representing families of victims of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Jones filed for bankruptcy in Texas late last year after a Connecticut state court ordered the far-right commentator and the company behind his Infowars platform to pay roughly $1.4 billion in damages for saying the shooting was a hoax. Families of those who were killed during the shooting and a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent sued over false statements Jones made about the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

The new owners of Buybuy Baby recently reopened 11 stores, betting that many expectant parents still prefer to shop for strollers, cribs and car seats in person.

Those stores had been closed for roughly three months after former parent company Bed Bath & Beyond’s bankruptcy. The baby-products retailer plans to open more than 100 new U.S. stores over the next three years, the company said, and eventually expand internationally. That number would put the company’s store footprint on par with where it was before the chapter 11 filing.

They are also working on smaller-footprint stores, which could number 200 additional locations.

When Credit Suisse’s board met to approve the bank’s forced sale to UBS in March, paintings of every bank chairman since 1856 lined the boardroom.

A lawyer from Zurich, Urs Rohner, was the last to get a portrait. Chairman between 2011 and 2021, he wasn’t there in person that day. But his tenure loomed over the proceedings. He had helped turn one of Switzerland’s most solid institutions into a tinderbox.

In the immediate aftermath of Credit Suisse’s demise, blame focused on external forces for causing the bank’s rich clients to flee, especially the panic that ensued after the surprise collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Switzerland’s patchy financial regulation played a role too.

Chinese authorities are taking more forceful action to contain the growing financial troubles of one of the country’s biggest shadow lenders.

Police in Beijing said over the weekend that they had taken “criminal coercive measures”—a euphemism for arrests—against multiple employees of Zhongzhi Enterprise. The privately held conglomerate operates several businesses that sold investment products to many wealthy individuals and companies in China, and has struggled for months to make promised payments to investors.

The police probe is an escalation of China’s response to the problems at Zhongzhi, which last week said it was insolvent and had at least $31 billion more liabilities than assets. Zhongzhi said it had been highly dependent on the decision-making of Xie Zhikun, its founder and largest shareholder, who died in December 2021.

Everyone has been looking for evidence of the pain in commercial property hitting banks. Behold, Switzerland’s Julius Baer.

The private bank Monday said it was reviewing its business of lending to rich clients after it took a hit on a 606 million Swiss franc ($680 million) exposure to a set of loans backed by a single client’s commercial real estate and luxury retail holdings.

It didn’t name the client, but a person familiar with matter said the loans are backed by Rene Benko’s troubled Austrian property group, Signa.

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