Tuesday Tidbits

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee ("HSGAC") held a confirmation hearing this afternoon for the President's nominee for OPM Director, Dale Cabaniss.  FedScoop reports on the hearing here. The FEHBlog watched the hearing. It's worth noting that Ms. Cabaniss, in contrast to the immediately preceding OPM Director Mr. Pon, is not interested in digitizing all of the personnel records in OPM's Boyers PA cave.

Meritalk.com reports that the House Oversight and Reform Committee plans to grill the OPM Acting Director Margaret Weichert about the President's plan to reorganize OPM on May 23. However, it is all together possible that on May 23 Dale Cabaniss will be the Senate confirmed OPM Director.  Time will tell.

The Chairman of the Senate HSGAC, Sen. Ron Johnson (R Wisc)  is taking another shot at repealing the Affordable Care Act provisions creating the OPM-mananged multi-state program, which currently has one participating single state plan in Arkansas.  According to the press release, OPM is one of the groups supporting repeal.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a new Novartis curative gene therapy drug Zolgensma is expected to be priced at $2 million per course of treatment.

Gene therapies target diseases that result from a faulty gene by introducing a working version into the body. They are attracting interest, both for their ability to cure otherwise devastating illnesses in one treatment and also for their high cost. Luxturna, the only gene therapy on sale in the U.S. so far to treat a form of inherited sight loss, costs $850,000 a patient. 

“A therapy is useless if no one can afford it,” said Cathryn Donaldson, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry association. She said members want to encourage innovation but that high prices are a problem.  The issue is gaining in importance as more gene therapies go on sale. The Food and Drug Administration expects to approve 10 to 20 gene and cell therapies a year by 2025.

The Centers for Disease Control issued a timely report on maternal deaths in the U.S. which is a topic in the 2020 OPM call letter for FEHB benefit and rate proposals.

In the merger and acquisitions world --

• Healthcare Dive reports on the status of Centene's efforts to acquire Wellcare. 
• Healthcare Leaders reports on the upcoming court hearing on the CVS-Aetna merger.