From Washington, DC

• MedCity News reports,
  • “In a letter to lawmakers on Monday, employer advocacy groups applauded the introduction of the Healthy Competition for Better Care Act, a bill that aims to increase competition in healthcare.
  • “The letter was signed by the American Benefits Council, the ERISA Industry Committee, the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions, the Purchaser Business Group on Health, the Silicon Valley Employers Forum and the Small Business Majority.
  • “The bill was introduced in the Senate last week by Jon Husted (R-Ohio). Reps. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), Rick Allen (R-Georgia), Donald Davis (D-North Carolina) and Chuck Edwards (R-North Carolina) previously introduced a companion bill in the House.
  • “Specifically, the Healthy Competition for Better Care Act aims to improve competition in healthcare by banning several types of anticompetitive contracts between insurers and healthcare providers. It would prohibit all-or-nothing clauses that force insurers to include every provider in their network, anti-steering and anti-tiering clauses that limit employers’ ability to direct patients to lower-cost or higher-quality providers, most-favored-nation clauses that require insurers to receive the lowest price and can drive prices up overall and gag clauses that restrict sharing cost information.”
    
• Federal News Network relates,
  • “After more than four weeks of a shutdown across the Department of Homeland Security, many federal unions and employee organizations are calling for relief for the impacted agency employees.
  • “Out of more than 260,000 DHS personnel, tens of thousands of employees have been feeling financial strain after working over a month without pay. That includes workers at the Transportation Security Administration, FEMA, Coast Guard, Secret Service and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Many employees missed a full paycheck last Friday — the first entirely skipped payday since the shutdown began.
  • ‘Despite no real progress by lawmakers toward a DHS spending agreement, National Treasury Employees Union President Doreen Greenwald demanded Congress find a way to reach a bipartisan solution to immediately end the funding lapse, which started Feb. 14.
  • “These frontline employees have had to wonder whether they’ll be able to pay their mortgage or buy groceries; a month of not knowing how long this shutdown will last,” Greenwald wrote in a recent letter to Congress. “Yet even with such uncertainty hanging over their heads, they still come to work every day to keep our country safe.”
• and
  • “The Postal Service is less than a year away from running out of cash and is calling on Congress to increase its limit to borrow money from the Treasury Department.
  • “Postmaster General David Steiner told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committeeon Tuesday that USPS is set to run out of cash in less than 12 months and that lawmakers need to act soon to keep the agency running.” * * *
  • “A Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday said the Postal Service’s business model is “unsustainable,” and that “urgent action” is needed to get ahead of a looming cash crisis.
  • “It’s highly unlikely that USPS will be able to fix its financial condition on its own. Congress will need to act,” David Marroni, GAO’s director of physical infrastructure, told lawmakers.”

• Per a U.S. Office of Personnel Management (“OPM”) news release,
  • “The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) today announced the launch of its new HR Shared Service Center,  a governmentwide initiative designed to modernize and streamline human resources service delivery across federal agencies.  
  • “Building on the Federal HR 2.0 vision, the Shared Service Center will deliver high quality, cost effective HR operations and strategic advisory services that strengthen agency mission delivery and improve efficiency. Services will be available to agencies on a voluntary, fee for service basis through OPM’s revolving fund authority.” * * *
  • “Agencies can view a full list of services or initiate onboarding by visiting opm.gov/sharedservice or contacting sharedservice@opm.gov.”  

• The Secrets of OPM blog written by OPM Director Scott Kupor has moved from OPM’s website to Substack. The Director added a new blog post today titled “Pulse Check.”

• WEDI has released the results of its latest survey of payers and providers about coming into compliance with new CMS rules on prior authorizations.
  • “The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) released results of its recent survey assessing industry readiness to meet the requirements of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Advancing Interoperability and Improving Prior Authorization Final Rule, also known as CMS-0057-F. With just under a year until the compliance deadline, the new survey results demonstrate that while the industry has made some progress, there is more work remaining in implementing, testing, and training to meet the regulatory requirements. This survey, conducted in February, is a follow up to the first two conducted by WEDI in October 2025 and January/February 2025.
  • “CMS-0057-F mandates the use of Patient Access, Provider Access, Payer-to-Payer, and Prior Authorization Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with the goal of increasing data sharing to streamline prior authorization and patient data exchange. Once implemented, these new data exchange methodologies are expected to deliver much-needed reduction in overall payer, provider, and patient burden. Impacted entities are required to implement the API requirements by January 1, 2027. The rule also requires covered payers to publicly report designated prior authorization metrics by January 1, 2026.”

From the judicial front,

• The New York Times reports,
  • “When a federal judge on Monday blocked the changes in vaccine policy set in motion by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the last year, public health groups hailed the ruling as a victory for science and evidence-based government recommendations.
  • “Their jubilation may be short-lived. The Trump administration is planning to appeal the decision, and if it does so quickly enough, an appeals court could overturn Monday’s ruling before the end of the week.
  • “The ruling revoked the authority of advisers appointed to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices by Mr. Kennedy to make vaccine recommendations, and ordered a return to the childhood vaccine schedule from before their appointment.
  • “On Tuesday, experts in public health, law and government said they were still trying to understand its ramifications.”

From the public health and medical / Rx research front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “People who eat around nine servings a day of ultraprocessed foods like chips and doughnuts have about a 67% higher risk of heart attacks, strokes and dying from heart disease compared with those who eat about one serving a day, according to a new study.
  • “The risks rose with each additional serving a person ate, according to the study published Tuesday in JACC: Advances, a journal of the American College of Cardiology.
  • “The findings add to a growing body of research linking diets high in ultraprocessed foods to a range of health problems. They were released as the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes steps to discourage eating junk foods, including issuing new dietary guidelines advising Americans to avoid highly processed foods with added sugars and salt, such as packaged chips, cookies and candy.”

• STAT News relates,
  • “The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults fell below 10% for the first time in recorded history in 2024.
  • “That’s a big deal in itself. Also remarkable is how everyone is finding out about it. 
  • “Reports of the historic dip in smoking didn’t come from the U.S. government, which had collected the data. Instead, the news came via an analysis in the digital journal NEJM Evidence by Israel Agaku, the founder and CEO of research technology company Chisquares.” 

• MedScape tells us,
  • “In patients without diabetes being treated with GLP-1s for overweight/obesity, persistence rates (rates of patients remaining on the drugs without treatment gaps) have significantly improved over the last 5 years, results from two new studies showed.
  • “This real-world analysis of high-potency, weight loss-indicated GLP-1 products among individuals without diabetes found that 1-year treatment persistence has nearly doubled from 2021 to the first half of 2024,” reported the authors of the first of the two studies, recently published in the Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy.”

• The National Institutes of Health’s Research Matters covers the following topics in this week’s release:
  • Blood test predicts start of Alzheimer’s Disease symptoms
  • Machine learning analysis of CT scans, and
  • Preventing organ transplant rejection

• MedPage Today adds,
  • “An earlier diagnosis and intervention strategy for Alzheimer’s disease is on the horizon, signaling a need to overhaul current detection methods and patient care protocols, experts at the Alzheimer’s Association Research Roundtable (AARR) said.
  • “Advances in biomarker technology, digital cognitive assessments, and amyloid-targeting therapies have redefined the opportunities for accurate and early diagnosis and care of Alzheimer’s disease,” reported Christopher Weber, PhD, of the Alzheimer’s Association in Chicago, and co-authors in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventionsopens in a new tab or window.
  • “These advances create new possibilities to intervene before the onset of cognitive impairment, Weber and colleagues wrote. Targeting the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, Weber said, “is similar to how doctors treat other diseases like heart disease and some cancers, where early detection and prevention are key parts of care.”

• Health Day informs us,
  • “Loneliness can impact a woman’s brain health as she begins menopause, a new study says.
  • “Loneliness and social isolation are both linked to the cognitive decline a woman feels as she begins to transition into menopause, researchers recently reported in the journal Menopause.
  • “Further, women experiencing both loneliness and social isolation are at greatest risk for brain decline, researchers found.” * * *
  • “These findings highlight the importance of psychosocial factors in cognitive health during the menopause transition,” researchers added.”
• and
  • “It’s long been known that exercise improves a person’s brain health – and researchers now think they better understand at least one of the factors at play.
  • “Just one 15-minute session of aerobic exercise floods the brain with brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein known to support the health of new and existing brain cells, researchers will report in the June 2026 issue of the journal Brain Research.
  • “What’s more, as a person’s fitness increases, so does the amount of BDNF released following exercise, researchers found.”

• Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News points out,
  • “The explosion of mRNA vaccines brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have proven that the delivery vehicles for those vaccines work incredibly well. Despite that, researchers are still working on improvements: to increase efficacy and reduce side effects from the vaccination. Now, researchers report modifications to lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that outperform leading, commercially available formulations while reducing common vaccine side effects in preclinical tests of human cells and mouse models.
  • “Changing the structure of the ionizable lipid of the LNPs boosted the metabolism of key immune cells, providing the energy necessary to gird the body’s defenses while dialing down the inflammatory signals that often cause fever and fatigue. The chemical tweak also enhanced on-target delivery of the nanoparticles to immune organs like the lymph nodes.
  • “This work is published in Nature Materials in the paper, “Crosslinked ionizable lipids reprogram dendritic cell metabolism for potent mRNA vaccination.”
  • “This is an early step, but it opens the door to a new generation of mRNA vaccines that are more potent and better tolerated,” says Michael J. Mitchell, PhD, associate professor in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead of accepting a trade-off between efficacy and side effects, we’re beginning to see that chemistry can help us improve both.”

• Per BioPharma Dive,
  • “Pfizer on Tuesday said a key experimental medicine helped stave off disease progression in a Phase 2 trial of patients with metastatic breast cancer.
  • “Atirmociclib is designed as a next-generation improvement on Pfizer’s Ibrance, the pioneer in a class known as cyclin-dependent kinase, or CDK 4/6 inhibitors. The drugs, which block proteins that tumors use to grow and multiply, have become a pillar of care for a common type of breast cancer known as HR+/HER2-.
  • “The new study, dubbed Fourlight-1, tested atirmociclib in patients who had previously tried CDK4/6 inhibitors. Researchers found that those given the experimental drug in combination with a widely used hormone therapy called fulvestrant had a 40% reduction in the risk of disease progression or death compared with those on another combination of medicines.”

From the U.S. healthcare business front,

• Fierce Healthcare reports,
  • “The health insurance industry’s credit outlook for the year remains negative as medical costs continue to rise, according to a new report from Moody’s Ratings.
  • “The Moody’s analysts said that in the current environment, payers will have “limited prospects for profitable growth” this year. Given the margin pressures facing the industry, plan redesigns, benefit cuts and exits from low-performing markets remain likely, per the report.
  • “Medical cost inflation has impacted every business line insurers have—Medicare Advantage (MA), Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act exchanges and commercial plans—and that trend is set to carry through the coming months. In addition, reimbursement rates have generally lagged these inflation rates, putting further pressure on plans, according to Moody’s.
  • “Key cost drivers range from pricey pharmaceuticals, increased intensity alongside higher utilization and higher coding intensity from providers, according to the report.
  • “Making improvements to earnings and margins has been a key focus for the major companies in this space, according to the report, making for a pivot from the growth mindset that was central for many of these firms.”
• and
  • “Highmark and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City have secured the necessary regulatory approvals to move their affiliation plans forward, the insurers announced Tuesday.
  • “The deal secured an O.K. from the Missouri Department of Insurance and is set to close on March 31, according to the announcement. Through the affiliation, Blue KC aims to improve outcomes and accelerate key innovations to support its members in the Kansas City region.
  • “The affiliation was first announced in December. Once it closes, the two insurers expect that integration will “take place over a phased period of time.” At present, nothing will change for members of either plan, according to the announcement.”

• Chief Health Executive informs us,
  • “Long known for its rankings of America’s best hospitals, U.S. News & World Report has been examining providers of outpatient care in recent years.
  • “Today, U.S. News released its list of the 2026 Best Ambulatory Surgery Centers. Working in partnership with Arcadia, a healthcare analytics firm, U.S. News examined 4,421 ambulatory surgery centers in specialties including colonoscopy & endoscopy; ophthalmology; orthopedics and spine; and urology.
  • “In its analysis, U.S. News named 911 surgery centers as worthy of recognition as the best, about one in five (21%) of those reviewed. Last year, 733 ambulatory surgery centers, or about 17% of those examined, earned U.S. News honors as the nation’s best performers.
  • “Ben Harder, chief of health analysis and managing editor at U.S. News, said the analysis of top surgery centers comes as more complex procedures are being done in outpatient facilities.
  • “Overall we found that ambulatory surgical care continues to be a very safe option for the vast majority of patients, even as utilization grows,” Harder said in an email to Chief Healthcare Executive®. “That’s reassuring for patients and suggests that the ongoing shift of care from hospitals to ASCs is likely to continue and, if anything, gather steam.”

• Beckers Hospital Review lets us know,
  • “Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health and Minneapolis-based Allina Health have signed a letter of intent for Allina to join the health system, creating a combined nonprofit organization spanning California, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
  • :The proposed transaction would create a system with 39 hospitals and more than 400 care sites, serving more than 5 million patients, according to a joint news release.
  • “Upon closing, the combined system would include 18,000 physicians and 88,000 employees across Northern and Central California and Minnesota and Wisconsin.
  • “Based on 2025 revenues, the combined organization would generate about $26 billion.”
• and
  • “The top 15 U.S. pharmacies accounted for nearly 75% of the nation’s $751 billion of prescription dispensing revenue in 2025, according to Drug Channels.
  • “CVS Health led all dispensing organizations with $119 billion in revenue, followed by Walgreens at $90.8 billion and Cigna’s Express Scripts at $80.5 billion. GLP-1 medications drove nearly 60% of retail revenue growth over the last five years and contributed significantly to a 10% year-over-year increase in total prescription spending.
  • “Centene entered the top 15 for the first time, reflecting its expanding presence in specialty pharmacy. Rite Aid’s continued store closures and bankruptcy reshaped market dynamics, while CVS and Walgreens have acquired more than 6,000 pharmacy locations since 2010.”