TOPEKA – The cooler temperatures over the weekend serve as a reminder that winter will be here before you know it. Heating your home during the winter months can create a financial burden. This year, the Kansas Department for Children and Families and the Propane Marketers Association of Kansas encourage propane users to fill early, while prices are lower. For those who relied on propane last year for heating, a propane shortage and high costs caught many residents by surprise.

“Now is the time to prepare for another potentially harsh winter,” DCF Secretary Phyllis Gilmore said. “Filling your propane tank during the early fall months will help ensure your family can stay warm and safe during the winter when temperatures dip.”

Last year, 719 Kansans benefited from the Emergency Propane Relief Program. Governor Sam Brownback directed DCF to help those who didn’t qualify for the Low-income Energy Assistance Program but were still struggling to meet the extreme costs associated with the propane shortage. In mid-January, propane costs spiked to $4.06 per gallon. The cost fell back to normal by March, to $1.17 per gallon.

The emergency program helped families whose income fell between 130 and 185 percent of the federal poverty level. It provided a one-time $511 benefit to eligible households. The LIEAP program served households with an income of less than 130 percent of the federal poverty level. LIEAP applications will be accepted, beginning January 20. Priority status will once again be issued for clients who list propane as their primary heating source on their LIEAP applications.

“The hope is that the Emergency Propane Relief Program will not be needed again; you can’t control Mother Nature,” PMAK Executive Vice President Greg Noll said. “If Kansas propane customers begin taking steps now to prepare for a difficult winter, we will be in much better shape this time around.”

Both PMAK and DCF are monitoring the situation closely. For more information about current prices and propane use in Kansas, contact the Propane Marketers Association of Kansas at 785-354-1749 or visit www.pmak.org. For more information about LIEAP, visit www.dcf.ks.gov.

HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) — Independent challenger Greg Orman had what sounded like a good line in his first debate with Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, but the incumbent warded it off.

The two squared off Saturday at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson. One question touched on how Roberts owns a Washington-area home but claims rented space in the Dodge City home of supporters as his official residence.

Orman told Roberts that he suspected he’s been to Dodge City more times this year than Roberts has. Orman says he’s visited four times.

Roberts told Orman that he’s been to Dodge City “about seven times” this year.

The 45-year-old Orman then suggested he’s lived more of his adult life in Kansas than the 78-year-old Roberts. The senator noted he was born and educated in Kansas.

STEVE KARNOWSKI, Associated Press

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Organic and specialty crop growers are trying to make a living off the rising consumer interest in locally grown and organic foods.

But the smaller farms are often islands surrounded by a sea of conventionally grown crops that get sprayed with herbicides, insecticides and fungicides.

Pesticide drift is a serious concern for them, and they’ve come up with a variety of defenses.

Many plant buffer strips. Twelve states participate in a registry of organic and other farms to tip aerial and ground sprayers off to areas they need to avoid. And in Iowa, a group has produced a pamphlet that instructs farmers how to protect vulnerable crops.

The aerial spraying industry and pesticide manufacturers, meanwhile, say they’ve made big strides in controlling drift through education and new technologies.

By Mary Agnes Carey
Kaiser Health News

WASHINGTON, D.C. — National health spending will increase modestly over the next decade, propelled in part by the gradual rebound of the U.S. economy and the growing ranks of Americans who became insured under the health law, government actuaries projected Wednesday.

But those growth rates are not as high as what the country saw for the two decades before the Great Recession crippled the U.S. economy at the end of 2007, according to the report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of the Actuary and published in the journal Health Affairs.

The actuaries estimate that health spending grew just 3.6 percent in 2013, the fifth year of historically low rates of spending growth. But it will accelerate to 5.6 percent in 2014. They also forecast that the average growth rate for 2015-2023 would be 6 percent. That is up just slightly from last year.

The findings also suggest that health care will outpace growth in the gross domestic product over the next decade. Health care’s share of GDP, which has remained fairly stable since 2009, will rise from 17 percent in 2012 to more than 19 percent in 2023.

While some health care analysts and Obama administration officials have said the Affordable Care Act is reducing costs, CMS actuaries are no longer measuring the effects of the law on health care spending.

“We are no longer quantifying the impacts of the Affordable Care Act on national health spending,” Andrea M. Sisko, the lead author on the study, told reporters at a briefing on the findings. “Now that the Affordable Care Act has been in place for well over four years, it is becoming increasingly difficult to accurately estimate … what the world would look like in the absence” of the law.

Sisko also said it is too soon to estimate the effect of the health law’s delivery system changes on the nation’s health care system.

Paul Ginsburg, a public policy professor at the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California, said the report illustrates that “the recession and the very slow recovery from the recession are important determinants of health spending trends …. There’s a been a lot of debate over the past year or two about how much of the slowdown we’ve experienced has been from the business or the economic cycle and how much is due to real changes in health care. My sense is it’s both. This very steep recession and this very slow recovery from it, especially when you look at the very low growth in wages, is something that has definitely depressed health care spending. The implication of higher deductibles, of greater cost sharing, that’s important as well.”

Better economic conditions, the aging of the baby boomer generation into Medicare and increased number of people with insurance are expected to result in greater demand for health care goods and services, increases in health coverage and faster rates of spending growth, in particular for private health insurance, the researchers said.

Those trends, the researchers said, will be countered by somewhat slower growth in Medicare payment rates mandated by the health law, cuts made to hospitals and doctors in the congressional budget-cutting efforts and the increasing use of higher deductibles in private insurance plans that have cut down on consumer health spending.

The number of uninsured people is projected to fall from about 45 million in 2012 to 23 million by 2023, according to CMS actuaries.

Other key takeaways from the CMS report include:

• Medicare spending growth slowed from 4.8 percent in 2012 to 3.3 percent in 2013. That was caused by the automatic 2 percent payment cuts known as sequestration and other payment adjustments, especially reductions in federal payments to the private Medicare Advantage plans that offer an alternative to traditional Medicare. Late last month, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that lower costs for medical services and labor will help reduce both Medicare and Medicaid spending over the next decade.

Continued movement of baby boomers in to the program and more spending on older beneficiaries will cause Medicare expenditures to rise 7.9 percent in 2020, according to the CMS report.

• Medicaid’s growth rate is expected to rise from 3.3 percent in 2012 to 6.7 percent in 2013, reflecting the health law’s Medicaid expansion – which is optional for states – and the effect of the law’s temporary payment increase for primary care physicians, among other factors. The researchers forecast that Medicaid spending will spike nearly 13 percent in 2014 but the growth rate will fall back to 6.7 percent the following year.

• In 2014, private health insurance premiums are projected to grow 6.8 percent, largely a result of higher per-enrollee spending and increased insurance coverage through the health law’s online marketplaces, or exchanges, and individually purchased insurance. For 2016-23, average premium growth for private health insurance is projected to be 5.4 percent per year.

• For 2016-2023, faster increases in disposable personal income and greater enrollment in private health insurance will contribute to the projected 6.1 spending growth per year for health care services, faster than the 4.7 percent average growth expected for 2013-15. But those conditions are likely to change, researchers warned.

“Consistent with the historical relationship between health spending and economic cycles, these projected changes in the economy are expected to influence health expenditure growth with a lag,” resulting in a projected peak growth in health spending of 6.6 percent in 2020, CMS said.