From Washington, DC,

• The House of Representatives and the Senate are in session for Committee business and floor voting this week on Capitol Hill.

• Roll Call offers a preview of these Capitol Hill activities.

• This is the last full week of the Federal Benefits Open Season which ends on December 8 and the Medicare Open Enrollment period which ends on December 7.

• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services posted fact sheets on the following topics:
  • “On November 28, 2025, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a final rule that announces policy changes under the Home Health (HH) Prospective Payment System (PPS), consistent with the legal requirements to update Medicare payment policies for home health agencies (HHAs) annually.”
  • and
  • “The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is making some important changes in the Durable Medical Equipment, Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Supplies (DMEPOS) Competitive Bidding Program (CBP) so that we can protect the Medicare Trust Funds and lower copays for beneficiaries. For more details, refer to the Calendar Year (CY) 2026 Home Health Prospective Payment System Final Rule (CMS-1828-F) displayed in the Federal Register on November 28, 2025.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

• The New York Times reports,
  • “A recently recognized form of dementia is changing the understanding of cognitive decline, improving the ability to diagnose patients and underscoring the need for a wider array of treatments.
  • “Patients are increasingly being diagnosed with the condition, known as LATE, and guidelines advising doctors how to identify it were published this year. LATE is now estimated to affect about a third of people 85 and older and 10 percent of those 65 and older, according to those guidelines. Some patients who have been told they have Alzheimer’s may actually have LATE, dementia experts say.
  • “In about one out of every five people that come into our clinic, what previously was thought to maybe be Alzheimer’s disease actually appears to be LATE,” said Dr. Greg Jicha, a neurologist and an associate director of the University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging.
  • “It can look like Alzheimer’s clinically — they have a memory problem,” Dr. Jicha said. “It looks like a duck, walks like a duck, but then it doesn’t quack, it snorts instead.”

• The Washington Post relates,
  • “Vaccines don’t just shield you from specific infectious diseases or help make symptoms less severe if you get sick but can also prevent common chronic illnesses, including some cancers, according to public health experts.
  • “We now have a more full understanding of how these vaccines go beyond just protecting us against the disease that they helped prevent,” said Richard Martinello, chief medical officer and infectious diseases physician at Yale School of Medicine.
  • “In addition to cancer, a growing body of research has shown that vaccines can reduce the risk of developing dementia and heart conditions. Vaccines can also help people with existing chronic conditions avoid getting sicker.”
  • The article identifies the common vaccines experts recommend
    • HPV
    • Shingles
    • Hepatitis B
    • Flu, coronavirus and RSV,
    • Bacterial vaccines

• The Wall Street Journal reassures us,
  • “Why does a glass of wine make a holiday party feel more festive? It might be because our forebears used to party.
  • “Not the ancient Greeks, though they did name a god of wine. Go back even further than that—some 50 million years further, when our primate ancestors began seeking out fermented fruits that naturally contained ethanol, scientists say.
  • “Those that could sniff out ethanol (or alcohol)—which gives off an odor, as we all know from the smell of a beer hall—were rewarded with a tasty nutritional gold mine: plant carbs and calorie-rich ethanol.
  • “All primates can metabolize ethanol, mining it for energy. But research that examined enzymes from ancestral primates indicated that around 10 million years ago, a digestive enzyme mutation allowed African apes—including the common ancestor of humans, gorillas and chimpanzees—to metabolize that alcohol 40 times more efficiently than other primates.
  • “The change made it even more beneficial to be able to find and consume alcohol in the wild, according to Nathaniel Dominy, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College.
  • “Fast forward to the advent of agriculture roughly 10 millennia ago, and humans began making alcohol intentionally in large and potent quantities. Today, of course, we have wide access to it.
  • “It’s been argued that the whole reason we domesticated cereals in the first place was to make beer, not bread,” Dominy said. “Our brains are wired to like it.”

• Medscape points out,
  • “Among patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D), those who underwent metabolic bariatric surgery experienced greater weight loss and reductions in A1c levels than patients who did not undergo surgery.” * * *
  • “These results support current clinical guidelines that recommend metabolic bariatric surgery for individuals with severe obesity or obesity-related complications who do not achieve adequate results through more conservative treatments,” the authors of the study wrote.”

From the U.S. healthcare business and artificial intelligence front,

• Beckers Health IT reports,
  • “Amazon plans to invest up to $50 billion to ramp up AI and supercomputing capabilities for federal agencies, boosting healthcare research and pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
  • “The tech giant intends to break ground on the data centers in 2026, providing Amazon Web Services’ U.S. government customers with an additional 1.3 gigawatts of AI and supercomputing capacity.
  • “We’re giving agencies expanded access to advanced AI capabilities that will enable them to accelerate critical missions from cybersecurity to drug discovery,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said in a Nov. 24 news release. “This investment removes the technology barriers that have held government back and further positions America to lead in the AI era.”
• and
  • Best Buy took a $192 million accounting loss after ending its hospital-at-home partnerships with health systems.
  • The tech retailer recorded the pretax, noncash asset impairments related to Best Buy Health in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, according to a Nov. 25 earnings report.
  • “The impairments were prompted by a change in Best Buy Health’s customer base during the quarter and reflect downward revisions in our long-term projections, in part due to pressures in the Medicaid and Medicare Advantage markets,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said in a Nov. 25 earnings call.

• Beckers Payer Issues identifies the “[t]en providers [which] recently posted job listings seeking leaders in payer contracting and relations.

• HR Dive informs us,
  • “After a year of mass layoffs and uncertainty, 2026 could stabilize hiring trends and bring equilibrium to the U.S. labor market, according to a Nov. 18 report from HireQuest.
  • “In particular, the job market appears to be stabilizing around skills-based hiring, the report found. In addition, late 2025 layoffs could reset — but not reverse — the market, as well as spur employee reskilling and contract-based hiring.
  • “2026 won’t be defined by a hiring boom or a bust but by more balance,” Rick Hermanns, president and CEO of HireQuest, said in a statement. “We’re seeing a labor market that’s stabilizing around new priorities: flexibility, fit and the kind of skilled work that can’t be automated.”