Weekend update

Congress returns to Capitol Hill this week. As Federal News Network noted on Friday. the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government will mark up its Fiscal Year 2020 appropriations bill tomorrow evening at 7 pm.  This bill includes FEHBP and OPM appropriations, thereby raising the Administration's OPM reorganization plan.

On Tuesday morning, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health will consider a raft load of healthcare bills, including a bill (HR 3030) to continue for another decade the expiring ACA obligation of health plans to fund the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. (The FEHBlog predicted this development.)  Meanwhile a bipartisan House bill (H.R. 1398) and a corollary Senate bill (S. 172) to extend the current suspension of the ACA's onerous health insurance tax for two more years beyond 2019 languish without committee consideration.

Also on Tuesday, according to a Wall Street Journal report,

CVS Health Corp. is expected to defend its acquisition of insurer Aetna Inc. in two high-profile settings Tuesday, seeking to sell skeptical investors and a federal judge on the nearly $70 billion deal. 

CVS lawyers are slated to be in a Washington, D.C., federal court for the start of an unusual three-day proceeding in which U.S. District Judge Richard Leon is considering whether the Justice Department adequately protected competition when it approved the deal last year. 

In New York, the Woonsocket, R.I.-based health-care company is holding an investor day to discuss its outlook, with analysts looking for evidence that CVS can improve its financial performance amid challenges to its core businesses.    

The U.S. Supreme Court starts the last month of its October 2018 term tomorrow. Oyez.com offers a list of the decided and as yet undecided cases from the current term.  The FEHBlog has been keeping his eyes on Kisor v. Wilkie

A case in which the Court will decide whether to overrule Auer v. Robbins, 519 U.S. 452 (1997), and Bowles v. Seminole Rock & Sand Co., 325 U.S. 410 (1945), which direct courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of its own ambiguous regulation.

Fierce Healthcare reports on an Optum list of five drugs pending Food and Drug Administration approval that are expected to have a significant market impact.

The products spotlighted are:

1. Onasemnogene abeparvovec, a gene therapy under the brand name Zolgensma that was recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration. [This is the drug that the manufacturer has priced at $2.1 million per patient (over five years).]
2. NKTR-181, an opioid that is designed to be less prone to abuse. 
3. Golodirsen, a treatment for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. 
4. Upadacitinib, a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. 
5. Tafamidis meglumine, a first-in-class treatment for transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy under the brand name Vyndaqel. 

As the FEHBlog has received advice about the importance of walking 10,000 steps (roughly four miles daily), the FEHBlog nearly fell off his chair laughing when he read this MarketWatch article last Friday.