Simplicity is a virtue.

From Washington, DC

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

• The Hill explains,
  • “House and Senate lawmakers will return to Washington this week with a packed agenda before much of their focus shifts to the fast-approachingmidterm elections.
  • “The Senate is expected to continue talks over the budget resolution and hold a procedural vote on the cryptocurrency regulation bill, among other priorities. The House, meanwhile, will reportedly consider a Senate-passed Russia sanctions bill prior to departing again until mid-November, after House Republican leaders recently cut two weeks from the chamber’s September schedule ahead of the midterms.”

• MedPage Today reports,
  • “Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, a bipartisan campaign founded by philanthropists Olivia and Tom Walton, announced a $100 million pledge to make giving birth in the U.S. safer.
  • “The 5-year commitment aims to cut the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. in half by 2031.
  • “For millions of moms in America, maternal health is bad and getting worse,” Olivia Walton told the Associated Press in an interview. “There’s just so much bipartisan consensus around wanting to fix this. I really think the political will is there and part of our job is to help surface that with an information campaign.” * * *
  • “According to the most recent data available, the U.S. has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations. The CDC said 688 people died in 2024 during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth. The maternal mortality rate rose to 19 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, up from 18.6 the year before.
  • “Improving data collection and accelerating hospitals’ reporting of deaths is an important pillar of the new Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America initiative, Walton said. The most recent state-level data on maternal mortality is still from 2022, with annual totals based on provisional data available through 2024.”

From the U.S. Office of Personnel Management front,

• Per Department of War news release,
  • “The Department of War has extended and expanded the Pilot Health Insurance Enhancement for DOW Civilian Employees in Japan, reaffirming its commitment to securing high-quality healthcare navigation and mitigating upfront medical costs for its overseas civilian workforce and their families.
  • “The contract extension, awarded to International SOS Government Services, Inc., begins Sept. 30, 2026, and runs through Sept. 29, 2027. In direct response to feedback from the DOW civilians, eligibility is now expanded to include authorized dependents of DOW civilian employees, provided they are enrolled in a participating Federal Employee Health Benefit plan.” * * *
  • “The pilot program, which originally launched on Jan. 1, 2025, was designed to provide no-cost supplemental health support services to DOW civilian employees. The program addresses longstanding challenges in navigating Japan’s healthcare system and managing upfront medical costs. In response to DOW civilian employee feedback, the program previously added interpreter services to address language barriers and improve access to care.
  • “Alongside the expansion of eligibility to dependents and as part of the contract extension, the program is updating call center hours. Beginning Sept. 30, 2026, the bilingual call center will operate Monday through Friday, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Japan Standard Time.
  • “To participate in the pilot, DOW civilian employees and their dependents must be enrolled in one of the following participating FEHB plans:
    • “Federal Blue Cross Blue Shield
    • “Foreign Service Benefit Plan
    • “Hawaii Medical Service Association
    • “Government Employees Health Association
    • “Mail Handlers Benefit Plan
  • “Nonappropriated Fund employees and their dependents in Japan are also eligible if enrolled in Aetna International and should coordinate support through their insurance carrier first.”

From the Food and Drug Administration front,

• MedCity News reports,
  • “Nutromics landed FDA breakthrough device designation this week for its wearable patch that monitors vancomycin levels in real time. 
  • “Vancomycin is a widely used antibiotic for treating life-threatening infections like sepsis, but it’s notoriously difficult to dose correctly, with doctors typically relying on periodic blood draws to track it.
  • “Nutromics was founded in 2017 with the goal of replacing these blood draws with continuous data for the roughly 2.9 million patients in the U.S. who receive vancomycin each year. The new designation gives the company faster, closer engagement with the FDA as it works toward an eventual commercial launch.”

No Surprises Act News

• On September 15, 2026, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will open its Independent Dispute Resolution Gateway to registration by non-initiating parties, typically health insurers and plans.
  • “All potential users of the IDR Gateway can begin creating accounts on September 15, 2026.
  • “Your organization should select at least one IDR Gateway administrator (CMS recommends two, and no more than 10) to set up your organization in the IDR Gateway.
  • “The Federal IDR Team will email selected administrators instructions to create their accounts and set up their organizations.
  • “If your organization selects you as an administrator and the Federal IDR Team did not email you instructions, email IDRGatewayHelp@cms.hhs.gov.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “A 40-year-old Pennsylvania woman died Saturday from complications associated with measles, the local coroner said.
  • “It was the first measles-related death in Jefferson County, according to county coroner Greg Furlong. The woman was unvaccinated, Furlong said.” * * *
  • “Measles cases in the U.S. are at their highest level in three decades, with 3,924 confirmed cases so far this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 2,289 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. last year, including the first measles-related death in a decade.
  • “The rapid spread illustrates a new normal in the U.S., where falling vaccination rates have made more communities vulnerable to the highly infectious disease that the country declared eliminated more than 25 years ago.”

• The Washington Post relates,
  • “The number of cancer deaths estimated to be attributable to alcohol in the United States doubled from 1990 to 2023, particularly among men and people aged 55 years and older, according to a University of Miami study published this month, adding to the body of recent research underscoring the health risks of alcohol consumption.
  • “Around 23,126 people died of alcohol-attributable cancer in 2023, up from 11,361 in 1990, according to the study, which estimated the deaths using a global database of disease mortality and population-level estimates of alcohol exposure.
  • “The impact of alcohol, a known carcinogen, increased over the past decades as cancer mortality decreased overall, according to the study. 
  • “Even though overall the cancer mortality was going down for some of these cancers … alcohol-associated mortality was going up,” said Chinmay Jani, a hematology-oncology fellow at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and one of the authors of the study. “Which means that alcohol as a risk factor was impacting more cancer deaths in 2023 than it was in 1990.” * * *
  • “Gilberto Lopes, chief of the division of medical oncology at Sylvester and another author of the study, added that the data did not establish a safe threshold for alcohol consumption. 
  • “It is difficult to ascertain exactly what the safe level of alcohol is,” Lopes said. But “it is quite clear that we do know the mechanisms through which alcohol causes cancer. So that there’s no dispute about.”

• The New York Times considers whether “Motion Sickness is Preventable?”
  • “Experts say there are ways to stave off that dreaded queasy feeling.”

• Health Day tells us,
  • “A widely used weight-loss and diabetes drug may offer a surprising bonus: healthier lungs.
  • “Researchers compared tens of thousands of patients prescribed either a GLP-1 medication or another type of diabetes treatment to see if they helped with asthma or COPD.
  • “The results: Only one — semaglutide, the active ingredient in drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy — made a difference.
  • “It was associated with nearly 40 percent fewer asthma attacks and 20 percent fewer COPD flare-ups.
  • “No significant association was found with the other GLP-1 meds, regardless of dose or underlying lung disease.
  • “The lead researcher calls the findings encouraging but says, for now: “People with asthma or COPD should not start GLP-1 receptor agonists specifically for their lung condition outside current prescribing guidance.”

• STAT News informs us,
  • “AstraZeneca said Friday that a breast cancer pill failed in a pivotal trial testing it as a first-line therapy in advanced tumors, a result that could limit the use of the medicine.
  • “The drug, camizestrant, in combination with another medicine did not outperform standard treatment on a measure of how long patients went before their cancer progressed. The SERENA-4 trial enrolled patients with ER-positive, HER2-negative advanced cancer who hadn’t had another systemic therapy for advanced disease.”
  • “Camizestrant earlier this month won accelerated approval in the U.S. as Etcamah as a treatment for patients who develop a mutation in their tumors that’s a sign of emerging drug resistance. The SERENA-4 trial, had it been successful, could have opened up a much larger market for the drug. 
  • “AstraZeneca is also testing camizestrant in early breast cancer.
  • “Early breast cancer represents an important opportunity, and we remain confident in the long-term potential of Etcamah in the early setting as we advance our broader program,” Susan Galbraith, AstraZeneca’s head of oncology R&D, said in a statement, adding that the company was “disappointed by the SERENA-4 outcome.”

• The New York Times points out,
  • “Until last Friday, cardiologists thought they were on the verge of a new frontier in treating heart disease.
  • “Three companies were conducting large clinical trials on experimental drugs that slash levels of a blood protein, Lp(a), thought to cause heart attacks and stroke. Doctors were eagerly awaiting the results, hoping the drug could be as important as a statin.
  • “When Novartis, the first company to complete its trial, announced its results, late Friday afternoon, after the markets closed, cardiologists were shocked. The drug could lower Lp(a) levels by 80 percent, but it did not prevent heart attacks and strokes. It had failed.
  • “There’s something we don’t understand here,” said Dr. John Alexander, a cardiologist at Duke.
  • “Cardiologists regularly see patients who have had heart attacks even though their cholesterol and blood pressure levels are low. They do not have diabetes or obesity, and they do not smoke, either. All too often, though, they have high levels of Lp(a).”
  • “About 20 percent of Americans have elevated levels; people with the highest levels of the protein can have double or triple the risk of a heart attack.
  • “So there was no question that Lp(a) was important. A drug to lower the level of the protein, cardiologists hoped, could provide a way for these patients to protect themselves.
  • “But the failure of the Novartis study raised an uncomfortable possibility: Maybe Lp(a) is not a cause of heart disease, but instead is a marker of heart disease risk, like white hair is a mark of aging.
  • “If Lp(a) is a marker, though, what is it marking? Is there another cause of heart disease that no one has thought of?
  • “That is “the nagging question we are all pondering,” said Dr. David Maron, president of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

• Benefits Pro reports,
  • Executives from Aetna and its parent, CVS Health, are hoping that focusing on Aetna’s relationships with doctors will be good medicine for soaring health coverage costs.
  • Steve Nelson — an executive vice president at CVS and president of Aetna — talked about Aetna’s efforts to hold down health coverage cost increases today [September 9, 2026], in Boston, during a session at a health care conference for investors organized by Wells Fargo.
  • “Absolute health care costs are still much higher than any of us would like to see them,” Nelson said.
  • “Aetna is organizing about 2,000 different initiatives to get cost trends under control, he said.
  • “If initiatives to support relationships with the providers succeed, that should make many of the initiatives work more smoothly, Nelson said.
  • “CVS streamed audio of the call live on the web and posted a recording online.”

• Reuters relates,
  • “GE HealthCare Technologies (GEHC.O) is ​in talks over a possible $1 ‌billion deal to buy radiopharmaceutical developer Sofie Biosciences, the Financial Times reported on ​Sunday [September 13, 2206], citing people familiar with ​the matter.
  • “A deal ⁠for Sofie, which specializes in ​radioactive chemicals used in cancer scans, ​could be announced as soon as next week, the report said.
  • “Reuters could not immediately ​verify the report. GE HealthCare ​declined to comment while Sofie Biosciences could ‌not ⁠be immediately reached for comment outside regular business hours.”