Weekend update

David Ermer–Congress, HSA, Rx coverage–
Bluebonnets — The Texas State Flower– already starting to bloom in Austin

From Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives and the Senate will be in session for Committee business and floor voting this week.

From the public health front —

  • McKinsey & Co. offers “insights to discover why it’s impossible to experience good health alone, and what shifts you can make now to strengthen your social world” in order to combat loneliness.
  • Fortune Well discusses “[a] ‘super strain’ of an antibiotic-resistant stomach bug [XBR Shingella] that is on the rise in the U.S.” Fortunately, the CDC offers ways to prevent a Shingella infection:
    • Carefully washing your hands with soap and water before sexual activity, eating or preparing food, and after going to the bathroom, changing a diaper, or cleaning up after someone who went to the bathroom;
    • Throwing away diapers in a covered, lined garbage can;
    • Cleaning up mess from diapers thoroughly and promptly;
    • Avoid swallowing water from lakes, ponds, and swimming pools and
    • Refraining from sex when you have diarrhea, and for two weeks after diarrhea resolves.

From the Rx coverage front —

  • The Wall Street Journal reports
    • The way doctors treat diabetes is changing.
    • For years, people with Type 2 diabetes who needed to take drugs to lower their blood-sugar levels started with an old medicine called metformin. New guidelines now recommend patients can start with one of the newer diabetes medicines, which can also reduce weight and protect the heart and kidney.
    • These newer diabetes drugs belong to two classes known by the acronyms SGLT-2 and GLP-1 for how they work.
    • The goal of the changes was to make treatment more specific to the patient rather than focused on the drug, said Dr. Nuha Ali El Sayed, an endocrinologist at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston who is vice president of healthcare improvement at the American Diabetes Association.
  • MedPage Today offers doctors ways to handle the current Adderall shortage.

From the worldwide healthcare front (and many FEHB plans (particularly nationwide plans) offer worldwide coverage), Beckers Hospital Review discusses  “Newsweek‘s 2023 list of top 250 global hospitals.”

From the plan design front, Financial Advisor points out an EBRI report on health savings accounts.

The New York Times Morning Column considers a renewed interest in workplace personality tests.

“Covid has opened our eyes to the fact that there are different ways in which we can work,” said David Noel, a human resources executive at Scotiabank, a Toronto-based bank with 90,000 employees. Partly for that reason, Scotiabank has begun to put more weight on personality tests, and less weight on résumés, when it makes hiring decisions.

In the post-pandemic era, personality tests seem to have a new relevance. They can help determine who will thrive in which work arrangements and what personality mix can maximize a team’s chance of success. Some advocates of the tests argue that they can also increase the diversity of a company’s work force by reducing the focus on standards that have traditionally benefited white men. Since Scotiabank began using personality tests more heavily in its campus hiring program, the share of its new employees who are Black has risen to 6 percent, from 1 percent.