This week, the House of Representatives and the Senate will be in session for flooring voting and Committee business. In addition, the House and the Senate will be taking District and State work breaks for two weeks beginning next Monday.

From the Omnicron and siblings front, the New York Times Well column advises on preparing now for the next surge. Of course, as we lawyers say, the Times is assuming facts not in evidence. Nevertheless, given the huge Omnicron surge last winter, an ounce of prevention may become a pound of cure.

Last week, Bloomberg updated its Covid resiliency ranking of the world’s countries. The U.S ranks 24. Norway, the United Arab Emirates, and Ireland hold the top three spots. Mainland China ranks 48, and Russia and Hong Kong have the last two spots, 52 and 53.

From the Rx coverage front, STAT News brings us up to date on the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company.

Mark Cuban’s drug company started with an ambitious premise: to circumvent middlemen to offer cheaper costs to patients.

To do so, the company has had to grapple with which parts of the supply chain to develop themselves, and which to outsource using unusually transparent contracts, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company Founder and CEO Alex Oshmyansky said Thursday at STAT’s Breakthrough Science Summit.

“We decided that the only way to really ensure that pricing for our products actually reaches the patient, the most important part at the end of the day, was to build essentially a parallel supply chain,” Oshmyansky said.

But the company’s ambitions to entirely recreate the pharmaceutical supply chain have started smaller in the process of exploring what’s possible, and what’s profitable.

For example, instead of manufacturing many drugs to sell them cheaply, the company is choosing to focus on manufacturing drugs in shortage to ensure there’s a market for them, and working directly with existing generic manufacturers to keep costs down.

“​​We basically said, ‘Hey, why don’t we, instead of going through the effort of manufacturing these products ourselves, why don’t we just purchase them and just sell them close to their actual price?’” Oshmyansky said.

A lofty plan to create their own pharmacy benefit manager has also been shelved for the moment, though Oshmyansky insisted it’s not off the table entirely. Instead of creating its own PBM, the company instead chose to whitelist PBMs that behave well for the moment.

From the health plan front —

• OPM and AHIP will hold the annual FEHB Carrier Conference later this month. Recently AHIP posted the conference agenda. In addition, the early registration discount ends on Friday, April 8.

• Last week, AHIP provided a lengthy list of health insurer actions to address social determinants of health. Bravo.