Weekend update

David Ermer–Congress, Federal employment benefits, Medical / Rx research, OPM, U.S. Healthcare–

From Washington, DC

  • Congress returns to Capitol Hill tomorrow following a two week long District / State work break.
  • Here is a link to this week’s calendar of Senate and House of Representatives committee business.
  • Roll Call offers an overview of this week’s activities.
    • “President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet at the White House Monday afternoon with Speaker Mike Johnson, beginning the first of several key legislative weeks for the president’s immigration, economic and tax policy agenda.”
  • Per a House Oversight Committee press release issued last Friday,
    • “House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) announced a markup will take place on Wednesday, April 30th at 10:00 a.m. ET to consider budget legislation to advance President Trump’s agenda to provide tax relief for American families and small businesses, rein in wasteful spending, and reduce the federal budget deficit for the American taxpayers. The House Oversight Committee’s budget reconciliation instructions require a net reduction in the federal deficit of no less than $50 billion and reforms to help balance the federal budget. Following the markup, the Committee will finalize its section of the budget legislation and transmit it directly to the House Committee on the Budget, which will compile and present the final package for consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives.”
  • The list of measures to be included in the markup includes
    • “SEC. 90006. FEHB PROTECTION –– Requires a comprehensive audit of employee dependents currently enrolled in FEHB plans—such as verifying marriage certificates and birth certificates—and requires any ineligible individual found to be receiving FEHB coverage be disenrolled. ($1.5 billion in net savings).”
  • This measure unfortunately overlooks the fact that OPM can but chooses not to use the HIPAA 820 electronic enrollment roster which would allow carriers to reconcile each enrollee with his / her premium payments. What is the sense of confirming family member eligibility if you don’t know whether the enrollee is paying the correct premium?
  • Federal News Network interviews Kevin Moss about what to expect from the FEHB / PSHB in 2026. What’s missing from OPM’s call letter and technical guidance? New cost containment measures.

From the public health and medical research front,

  • The New York Times reports,
    • “When a person develops solid tumors in the stomach or esophagus or rectum, oncologists know how to treat them. But the cures often come with severe effects on quality of life. That can include removal of the stomach or bladder, a permanent colostomy bag, radiation that makes patients infertile and lasting damage from chemotherapy.
    • “So a research group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, using a drug from the pharmaceutical company GSK, tried something different.
    • “The researchers started with a group of 103 people. The trial participants were among the 2 to 3 percent of cancer patients with tumors that should respond to immunotherapy, a drug that overcomes barriers that prevent the immune system from attacking cancers.
    • “But in clinical trials, immunotherapy is not supposed to replace the standard treatments. The researchers, led by Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr. and Dr. Andrea Cercek, decided to give dostarlimab, an immunotherapy drug, on its own.” * * *
    • “In 49 of the patients, who had rectal cancer, the tumors disappeared and, after five years, have not recurred. Cancers also vanished for 35 of 54 patients who had other cancers, including in the stomach, esophagus, liver, endometrium, urinary tract and prostate.
    • “Out of all 103 patients, cancers recurred in only five. Three got additional doses of immunotherapy and one, whose tumor recurred in a lymph node, had the lymph node removed. Those four patients so far have no evidence of disease. The fifth patient had additional immunotherapy that made the tumor shrink.
    • “The investigators reported their results Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research and in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
    • “The results, said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, are “groundbreaking.”
  • Medscape tells us,
    • “Malnutrition-related diabetes, distinct from both type 1 and type 2, has now been officially recognized and named “type 5 diabetes.”
    • “The vote to endorse the category took place on April 8, during the International Diabetes Federation’s (IDF’s) World Diabetes Congress, held in Bangkok, Thailand. In January 2025, a panel met in India to draft a consensus statement about the condition, due to be published soon, Meredith Hawkins, MD, professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, told Medscape Medical News.
    • “Malnutrition-related diabetes has historically been vastly underdiagnosed and poorly understood…The IDF’s recognition of it as ‘type 5 diabetes’ is an important step toward raising awareness of a health problem that is so devastating to so many people,” Hawkins said.”
  • The New York Times Well site provides a personalized protein target and protein counter. Check it out.