Thursday Miscellany

Photo by Josh Mills on Unsplash

From the COLA front —

Federal News Network informs us

Federal retirees and Social Security recipients are about to get the largest increase in their cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in over four decades.

The COLA will increase 8.7% for 2023, the Social Security Administration announced on Oct. 13. But not all federal retirees will see that amount added to their checks. Those in the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS) will receive a 7.7% COLA starting in January.

In contrast to the Civil Service Retirement System, whose annuitants receive the 8.7% COLA, FERS is integrated with Social Security retirement benefits. Consequently, FERS annuitants will receive the 8.7% COLA on their Social Security benefits. Here’s the government’s Social Security 2023 Changes Fact Sheet.

The Society for Human Resource Management offers Social Security tax changes information relevant to employers and employees.

From the Omicron and siblings front, the Wall Street Journal reports

The retooled Covid-19 booster from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SEgenerated a strong immune response against the Omicron substrains BA.4 and BA.5, the companies said. 

The data, which the companies reported in a news release Thursday, offer the first window into how the new shots rolling out across the U.S. perform.

An early look at data from ongoing testing in people at least 18 years old found the booster generated higher levels of neutralizing antibodies against the two substrains compared with levels measured before the extra shot, the companies said.

Researchers also found the vaccine, called bivalent because it targets both the Omicron substrains as well as the original strain of the virus, was well-tolerated and worked safely.

From the monkeypox front, the New York Times Morning column assesses the lessons that “Monkeypox’s decline has for future disease outbreaks.”

Ultimately, monkeypox in the U.S. has been contained to a narrow demographic, mostly gay and bisexual men with multiple partners. It was never very deadly; there were just 28 confirmed deaths globally out of more than 72,000 reported cases. (I wrote earlier about the virus and how it spreads.)

Four factors explain monkeypox’s decline, experts said. First, vaccines helped slow the virus’s spread (despite a rocky rollout). Second, gay and bisexual men reduced activities, such as sex with multiple partners, that spread the virus more quickly.

The third reason is related: the Pride Month effect. Monkeypox began to spread more widely around June, when much of the world celebrated L.G.B.T.Q. Pride. Beyond the parades and rallies, some parties and other festivities involved casual sex. As the celebrations dwindled, so did the increased potential for monkeypox to spread.

And finally, the virus simply burned out. Monkeypox mainly spreads through close contact, making it harder to transmit than a pathogen that is primarily airborne, like the coronavirus. “Because of that, monkeypox is a self-limiting virus,” Apoorva told me. That made it less likely to grow into a larger outbreak.

Much of this explanation may sound familiar after more than two years of Covid: A virus can be tamed by vaccines and behavioral changes.

From the public health front, the UnitedHealth Foundation released the Sixth edition of its U.S. Health Rankings for Women and Children.

The 6th edition of America’s Health Rankings® Health of Women and Children Report shines a light on the health challenges faced by the nation’s women and children. The report builds on United Health Foundation’s commitment to support better health and encourages others to join in building healthier communities.

Visit the Health of Women and Children Report Action Toolkit to access additional resources that can help you share the data with relevant stakeholders and enact change.

This year, the Health of Women and Children Report finds that:

* Rates of mental and behavioral health challenges have increased broadly among women and children across the nation in recent years, though rates vary widely based on geography, race/ethnicity and socioeconomic factors.
* The overall mortality rate among women ages 20-44 increased dramatically during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbating existing disparities.
* The pandemic underscored the need to address long-standing disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity, which continue to disproportionately burden Black and American Indian/Alaska Native women.
* In the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, several socioeconomic and environmental conditions that shape health worsened. Women experienced record-high unemployment and markers of health related to children’s neighborhoods and home environments declined.
* The healthiest states are Minnesota, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey and Utah. Louisiana had the most opportunity to improve, followed by Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Alabama.

STAT News adds

In the numbers game of disease statistics, type 1 diabetes takes a back seat to type 2 diabetes, which accounts for more than 95% of diabetes cases around the globe. But the impact of type 1 diabetes (T1D), which tends to emerge earlier in life and can quickly kill an individual if it goes unrecognized or untreated, is huge. Its global burden, however, hasn’t been well understood — until now.

With the proper care and treatment, including access to insulin, which people with type 1 diabetes must use every day, individuals can live long and healthy lives with this disease. But many in the United States and countries around the world do not have access to even the most basic treatments.

To assess the impact of type 1 diabetes, JDRF, the organization [the author] lead[s], and its global partners created the Type 1 Diabetes Index (T1D Index), a first-of-its-kind tool, to identify and address the wide gaps in knowledge about the incidence and impact of type 1 diabetes country by country. With this knowledge, interventions can be developed that will save lives and improve the health of those living with the disease.

From the U.S health care business and innovations front —

Healthcare Dive reports

Walgreens expects its U.S. Healthcare division, which includes primary care chain VillageMD, specialty pharmacy company Shields Health Solutions and at-home care provider CareCentrix, to reach profitability in 2024, CEO Roz Brewer told investors on a Thursday call for Walgreens’ fourth-quarter results.

Walgreens is also increasing its long-term sales outlook for the new division to between $11 billion and $12 billion in sales by 2025, with VillageMD being the largest contributor. In the 2022 fiscal year, U.S. Healthcare brought in $1.8 billion in sales.

Despite a net loss in the fourth quarter, the Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmacy chain beat analyst expectations for both earnings and revenue.

and

GoodRx — the consumer-facing, digital drug discount startup — is launching a new version of its platform that is tailored for providers.

Doctors, medical office staff and other healthcare workers have already been using the consumer-facing version to help patients find discounts and programs to help them afford prescribed medications, GoodRx Executive Medical Director Preeti Parikh, said.

Targeting providers directly is a pivot from GoodRx’s traditional consumer focus, but the company found it necessary and sees an opportunity to capture more pharmaceutical advertising revenue in the process, she said.

Fierce Healthcare tells us

The hospital industry’s recent shift toward fewer, but larger, merger and acquisition deals continued through the third quarter of 2022, according to a new report.

There were 10 hospital and health system transactions announced from July through September by advisory firm Kaufman Hall’s count—up slightly from last year’s seven announced deals but still well below the 19 from 2020 or the 25 from 2019.

The total transacted value of those 10 deals, however, exceeded nearly all of the third-quarter totals measured by the firm in the last seven years.

The past three months’ $8.3 billion handily outpaced 2021’s $5.2 billion and 2020’s $7.4 billion, the firm wrote, and is only beaten by the $10.8 billion recorded among 19 deals back in 2018.

and

Pacific Northwest insurer Regence is teaming with MultiCare Connected care to roll out a new tool that aims to ease the administrative burden of prior authorization.

Regence and MultiCare, an accountable care organization, will be the first in the nation to roll out new prior authorization standards backed by HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR. As FHIR is supported by most electronic health records, the tool can be embedded directly in physicians’ workflows and enables them to receive near real-time determinations.

Finally, OPM announced

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that the Honorable Denis McDonough, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Kiran Ahuja will be serving as the National Honorary Co-Chairs of the [ongoing] 2022 Combined Federal Campaign (CFC). 

 The CFC is a 61-year annual giving tradition that allows the Federal workforce to donate directly to thousands of eligible charities and causes locally, nationwide, and throughout the world. Through the contributions of Federal employees, military employees, and retirees, the 2021 CFC raised over $80 million. An additional Special Solicitation took place earlier this year to benefit those affected by the war in Ukraine.   

The campaign run from September 1st, 2022 through January 14, 2023.