Simplicity is a virtue.

From Washington, DC

• The Senate will be in session this week on Capitol Hill for Committee business and floor voting. The Senate will join the House of Representatives on the election campaign trail at the end of the week.

• Roll Call discusses anticipated Senate activities this week.

• The U.S. Supreme Court will gear up for its October 2026 term this week. On Friday, the Court will release its long list of orders on cert petititions and more that have piled up since June.

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

• The FEHBlog expects that OPM will publicize 2027 FEHB and PSHB premiums sometime over the next two weeks. Last year, OPM publicized 2026 premiums on October 9, 2025.

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

• Healio reports,
  • “Autism prevalence has not significantly changed since 2005, according to a large population-based study of schoolchildren in South Korea.
  • “HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other U.S. health officials have claimed there is an autism “epidemic,” blaming vaccines, acetaminophen and environmental toxins as potential causes for the rise in diagnoses.” * * *
  • “Research has shown that there has been an increase in autism diagnoses, but experts say that is due to earlier detection and expanded diagnostic criteria. Young Shin Kim, MD, MS, MPH, PhD, a developmental psychopathologist at University of Texas Dell Medical School, told Healio that it is difficult to interpret data about autism prevalence because of the large variation in how those data are collected and reported in different states, countries and health systems. * * *
  • “Kim and colleagues investigated autism prevalence in South Korea. Elementary education is mandatory in South Korea, and Kim said homeschooling is rare, which allowed the researchers to screen nearly every child in the country when they started school.” * * *
  • “Our findings do not support interpreting increases in reported autism prevalence as evidence of an ‘autism epidemic,’” Kim said. “Much of the increase may reflect improved awareness, broader identification and the recognition of children who were previously missed.”

• Per a National Institutes of Health news release,
  • “The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today [September 24] launched Linked Discoveries, an experimental tool designed to help scientists more easily see how an individual research finding relates to the larger body of biomedical evidence. From a citation in PubMed, users can use the Linked Discoveries tool to explore a “neighborhood” of publications closely related to that article, including replication studies. More than 29 million PubMed publications are represented in Linked Discoveries at launch. 
  • “Developed by NIH’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), which oversees PubMed, Linked Discoveries is an early product of NIH’s agency-wide initiative to strengthen replication and reproducibility in NIH-funded research. In particular, this tool seeks to address the difficulty of determining how a finding fits within the existing evidence. Relevant studies and other research information may be dispersed across different resources, and traditional approaches to finding scientific literature can favor already prominent or frequently cited work. Linked Discoveries begins to address that challenge by giving researchers a more connected view of publications related to a particular study.” * * *
    
• Health Day relates,
  • “A well-known brain-healthy diet appears to ward off decline and dementia by protecting a person’s arteries, a new study says.
  • “People who followed the MIND diet had healthier blood vessels in their brains, contributing to larger brain sizes and better cognitive function, researchers report in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
  • “One of the most striking findings was that the relationship remained significant even after accounting for factors such as physical activity, body mass index, race and vascular disease,” said lead researcher Puja Agarwal, an assistant professor of internal medicine at Rush University in Chicago.
  • “This suggests that diet may have an independent role in supporting brain health,” she added in a news release.”
• and
  • “Loneliness and social isolation can cost a person up to six years of healthy life, a new study says.
  • “Physical and mental health suffer when people feel lonely and become isolated, even if they largely stick to healthy habits, researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Communications.
  • “The two conditions are different. Social isolation refers to having few relationships or limited contact with others, while loneliness is a distressing feeling caused by a lack of meaningful connection, according to the National Council on Aging.
  • “In other words, people can be socially isolated but still not feel lonely if they are getting what they need from whatever connections they do have.” * * *
  • “Notably, a healthier lifestyle — diet, exercise, sleep and not smoking — narrowed the loss of disease-free years linked to social isolation, but did not significantly reduce the health risks of loneliness.
  • “The findings weren’t surprising to me,” Qi concluded. “Previous studies found that social isolation and loneliness are related to mortality, especially premature mortality, and this study provides additional evidence.”

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

• The Business Group on Health considers “Why are Healthcare Costs So Difficult to Forecast?” 
  • “Explore why healthcare costs are increasingly difficult to forecast and how employers are responding to volatility with greater urgency and accountability.”
  • “Healthcare cost volatility is no longer a temporary disruption. It is becoming a defining feature of the healthcare landscape. After consecutive years of missing cost projections and facing record-high increases, employers are confronting a fundamental question: Which new strategies and approaches do we need to deploy to address this persistent and volatile landscape? 
  • “The employers that thrive in this environment will be the ones willing to rethink how care is purchased, act with a sense of urgency, demand greater accountability from partners, and embrace disruption when it creates better outcomes. In a market defined by uncertainty, standing still may be the riskiest strategy of all.” 

• The Hill reports,
  • “After analyzing claims data from 2021 to 2023, the personal finance site [MoneyGeek] found the average out-of-pocket cost of a vaginal delivery was $2,563 and a C-section was $3,071.
  • “These estimated totals include the cost of staying at the hospital, the line item charges for medication, and seeing different types of physicians (obstetricians, anesthesiologists, etc.).
  • “The states with the highest bills, surprisingly, are places often thought of having a low cost of living, like Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota. Average deliveries in all three states can cost patients upwards of $2,500 out-of-pocket.” * * *
  • “Meanwhile, in Michigan, the average delivery costs $974 out-of-pocket. What accounts for such a big difference? In most cases, it comes down to what hospitals have negotiated with insurers, according to MoneyGeek.”
  • “As the California Health Care Foundation explains, differences in price between different hospitals has little to do with the quality of care received. It has more to do with how much competition there is in a market. 
  • “Decades of research shows that prices for inpatient and outpatient services — from C-sections to CT head scans — are higher when there is less competition,” write Kristof Stremikis and Catherine Teare. “This happens when hospitals, medical groups, or health plans merge or buy their competitors. With fewer choices, a big system in one area can set higher prices and anti-competitive contract terms.”
    
• The Wall Street Journal lets us know “People Are Lining Up for Full-Body Scans. But Are They Necessary?”
  • “Neko Health, a Spotify founder’s preventative-health startup, opened its first U.S. clinic.”
  • [Neko Health] had amassed a wait list of around 25,000 New Yorkers before the location was announced, a company spokesperson said. It opened its doors on Thursday [September 24]. The Swedish brand is the brainchild of Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne, Neko Health’s CEO.
  • “It is the latest in a wave of preventative-health companies hitting the U.S. market, pitching patients on the notion that more information can give them more control over their health. For $499, which people can use HSA or FSA funds to help cover, the “radiation-free” visit includes a skin examination with visual and thermal cameras, a cardiovascular assessment, a body-composition analysis and on-site blood-testing. That takes about 30 minutes, then a clinician will meet with patients for another 30 minutes to discuss the results. It aims to help people assess risk of skin cancer, cardiovascular disease and metabolic conditions.” * * *
  • Some medical professionals have criticized preventive MRIs as unnecessary. But their potential for early detection, even before symptoms arise, shouldn’t be dismissed, said Dr. Zahi Fayad, director of the Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
  • “We still need to learn which people benefit most, how often to scan them and whether earlier detection changes their long-term outcomes,” he said.” * * *
  • “He shared advice for patients interested in getting a scan: “First, tell me what you are hoping to learn. If there is a symptom or a strong family history, we should choose the test that addresses that concern.”
  • “He added, “Neither service should replace recommended cancer screening or attention to blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes risk, exercise and smoking.”