Weekend Update

David Ermer–Uncategorized–
Bluebonnets / The Texas State Flower

The House of Representatives and the Senate are on District / State work breaks for the next two weeks.

OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs concluded on March 29 its work on OPM’s Postal Service Health Benefits Program interim final implementation rule. The rule will be published in the Federal Register this week.

On Friday, the Justice Department noticed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from the Northern District of Texas’s ruling on the role of USPSTF in the ACA preventive services mandate provision. The motion to stay is stepping up the plate.

From the Omicron and siblings front, Fortune Well discusses a new Omicron variant.

XBB.1.16, dubbed “Arcturus” by variant trackers, is very similar to U.S. dominant “Kraken” XBB.1.5—the most transmissible COVID variant yet, Maria Van Kerkhove, COVID-19 technical lead for the WHO, said earlier this week at a news conference. 

But additional mutations in the virus’s spike protein, which attaches to and infects human cells, has the potential to make the variant more infectious and even cause more severe disease. For this reason, and due to rising cases in the East, XBB.1.16 is considered “one to watch,” Van Kerkhove says.

It’s a warning we’ve heard before about other Omicron spawn—XBB.1.5 in particular. The variant, which rose to prominence late last year and early this year, elicited warnings that it could cause more severe disease, based on new mutations it had developed. 

It was a fate that didn’t play out—though the variant certainly took the lead when it came to transmissibility. XBB.1.5 accounted for just under half of all globally sequenced cases in early March, according to the WHO.

Only time will tell when it comes to what, if any, differences in severity XB.1.16 will display. Mutations that seem concerning in theory aren’t always concerning in real life because of the highly complex nature of population immunity.

The FEHBlog does plan to lose sleep over XB1.16.

In other public health news, the American Medical Association identifies six things that doctors wish their patient knew about better nutrition.

From the end of the public health emergency front, Healthcare Dive is following the unwinding of the great Medicaid expansion that occurred during the pandemic.

In the U.S. healthcare business news, Healthcare Dive tells us

  • Uber Health is foraying deeper into healthcare with a new feature that allows providers to order prescriptions to be dropped off at patients homes same-day.
  • The same-day prescription delivery is meant to help patients adhere to a medication schedule, Uber said Thursday. The service is made possible through an integration of Uber Health’s dashboard with ScriptDrop, a tech platform connecting patients and pharmacies with couriers nationwide.
  • The company also said it expects to soon launch delivery of healthy food and over-the-counter medicine for patients, including Medicare Advantage and Medicaid beneficiaries.

In OPM news, the agency per Govexec “on Friday published new guidance tasking agencies with updating their policies to ensure that they afford a “non-discriminatory and inclusive” work environment to all employees, particularly transgender and other gender non-conforming workers.”