WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is joining the debate over the Senate’s torture report by saying it is difficult to rule out the use of extreme measures to extract information if millions of lives were threatened.

Scalia tells a Swiss radio network that American and European liberals who say such tactics may never be used are being self-righteous.

The 78-year-old justice says he doesn’t “think it’s so clear at all,” especially if interrogators were trying to find a ticking nuclear bomb.

Scalia says nothing in the Constitution appears to prohibit harsh treatment of suspected terrorists.

The interview took place at the court on Wednesday, the day after the release of the Senate report detailing the CIA’s harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists. Radio Television Suisse aired the interview on Friday.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Jurors have returned to court to decide whether to recommend the death penalty or life without parole for a man convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing an 8-year-old Topeka girl.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that the penalty phase of Billy Frank Davis Jr.’s capital murder trial got underway Friday in Shawnee County District Court. Jurors deliberated 17 hours before finding the 31-year-old Davis guilty Thursday of 10 counts, including capital murder. The body of Ahliyah Nachelle Irvin was found in a dryer in March 2012 after she disappeared from an apartment.

Prosecution witness Joy Thomas testified Friday that the girl suffered the worst injuries that she had seen in 30 years of conducting sexual assault examinations. Jurors will hear Monday from a defense witness from Atlanta.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) received word that Kansas National Guardsmen will no longer be deployed by the Department of Defense (DoD) to support Ebola response operations in West Africa. During a meeting Thursday with General Frank Grass, Chief of the National Guard Bureau, in Sen. Moran’s Capitol Hill office, the senator raised questions about the deployment of the 891st Engineer Battalion and General Grass indicated that the deployment had been cancelled.

“As a result of the decline in Ebola cases in West Africa, the Department of Defense has cancelled the deployment of the Iola-based 891st Engineer Battalion in the Kansas National Guard,” Sen. Moran said. “It is a pretty nice Christmas present for the families of the 891st Engineer Battalion to know that their loved ones will no longer be deployed to West Africa in March. Guardsmen live by the motto ‘Always Ready, Always There’ and the National Guard celebrated 378 years of service to our country this week – Kansans stand ready for their next call of service.”

The decision to cancel the deployment of the Kansas National Guard was made because the total Army and National Guard requirements have dropped and there is enough capacity to support the current operations on the ground.

Following the DoD’s selection of the 891st Engineer Battalion for deployment authority to West Africa in November 2014, Sen. Moran expressed concerns about diminished customary benefits because of the non-combat nature of the deployment. Sen. Moran immediately called on DoD Secretary Chuck Hagel to direct an exception to make certain National Guardsmen and their families are receiving the same benefits as Active Duty service men and women. The DoD immediately resolved the matter and utilized a different deployment authority that would provide customary benefits to soldiers and their families prior to deployment.

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) — Several civic and business leaders in Leavenworth are asking Army officials to spare the community from thousands of potential job cuts.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports the military is considering where to make reductions required by law. Federal officials must cut the Army from 490,000 to 450,000 people by 2020. A commission has already announced a potential loss of 2,500 personnel at Fort Leavenworth.

An official with the Mid-America Regional Council warns an extra 2,500 jobs could be lost in the Kansas City metro region because of a reduction at Fort Leavenworth. The director of the Governor’s Military Council says tax revenue could decline in Leavenworth by $1.7 million annually.

Brig. Gen. Roger Cloutier stressed that nothing has been decided yet and that officials’ comments would be taken back to senior leadership.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Kansas City police say three middle school students were taken to a hospital as a precaution after their school bus collided with a car.
The accident early Friday involved a bus carrying students from Smith-Hale Middle School in the Hickman Mills District. Police say the children were taken to the hospital to be checked for possible injuries.

Police say the drivers of the bus and car suffered minor injuries when the vehicle hit the side of the bus at an intersection that does not have a stop sign.
An investigation is continuing.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A man convicted of killing a woman over a dispute about an inheritance will be resentenced.

The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first-degree murder conviction of Olin Coones for the 2008 killing of 45-year-old Kathleen Hadley-Schroll of Wyandotte County. But the court vacated his sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 50 years and ordered that he be resentenced.

Prosecutors said Coones killed Hadley Schroll, who had been his father’s caretaker, because he was angry that his father left her some of his estate. Coones was acquitted of killing Hadley-Schroll’s husband, who was also found dead in their home.

The new sentence was ordered because a judge, and not a jury, imposed the sentence, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in June 2013.

By Andy Marso
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — When Gov. Sam Brownback announced this week a list of stopgap measures to close a $280 million budget hole, one of the biggest chunks was $55 million from a “Kansas Department of Health and Environment Fee Fund Sweep” made possible in part by a federal law the governor has strenuously opposed and criticized.
The $55 million comes from a Medicaid drug rebate program that was expanded as part of the federal Affordable Care Act.
The health reform act, commonly known as Obamacare, increased the refunds that pharmaceutical companies must pay states for prescriptions provided to Medicaid patients and allowed states to collect rebates for Medicaid prescriptions administered by managed care organizations.

“I know the extension to the managed care plans was a big deal, because that’s where states have been moving,” said Stacey Mazer, a senior staff member at the National Association of State Budget Officers. “That piece (of the ACA) was something that was a net gain essentially for states, the fact that it was being applied to the Medicaid managed care plans.”

Mazer, who monitors and studies how federal health care and Medicaid policies affect state budgets, said she could not say how much of a financial gain the legislation represented for specific states.

In addition to allowing states to collect the rebates on prescriptions administered by managed care organizations, the ACA increased the drug rebates. It upped the rebate percentage for most brand-name drugs from 15.1 percent of the average manufacturer price to 23.1 percent, increased the rebate for brand-name clotting factor and pediatric drugs from 15.1 percent to 17.1 percent, and increased the rebate for generic drugs from 11 percent to 13 percent.

The pharmacy drug rebate money was the largest portion of $100 million in “efficiencies” that Kansas Budget Director Shawn Sullivan identified in October as Brownback campaigned for re-election amid concerns about the projected budget deficit.

Sullivan, at the time, credited an increase in Medicaid prescriptions and the three managed care organizations contracted to provide all Medicaid services under KanCare for the windfall.

“The additional revenue from the rebates is the result of higher-than-expected pharmacy utilization among the Kansas Medicaid population and better pharmacy program administration by the MCOs in the state,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan never mentioned the ACA’s role regarding the drug rebate money available to plug the budget hole.

After the governor released his proposal Tuesday, Sara Belfry, a spokeswoman for KDHE, initially said “the ACA doesn’t have a role” in the $55 million, but later apologized, saying she “had gotten incorrect information about the ACA’s role in the pharmacy rebate program.”

The state would not have been allowed to continue collecting the rebates after it switched most of its Medicaid recipients to managed care in 2013 if the Affordable Care Act had not been passed years earlier.

“Section 2501(c) of the Affordable Care Act expanded the rebate requirements to include drugs dispensed to beneficiaries who receive care from Managed Care Organizations, MCOs, effective March 23, 2010,” a spokeswoman from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said.

Medicaid Health Plans of America, an advocacy group for private managed care organizations with Medicaid contracts, praised Congress for including the provision in the ACA.

“This ends a long-time disparity in law that disadvantages states from receiving additional rebates for drugs simply because Medicaid beneficiaries are in Medicaid health plans,” the group said in a statement released at the time. “We believe this is a tremendous improvement in the administration of state Medicaid programs and will help improve care coordination and the quality of health care for Medicaid members.”

Julia Paradise, associate director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, said prior to the ACA, states that used managed care organizations for Medicaid carved out prescription drugs from the MCO plans and kept them in the traditional state-administered fee-for-service Medicaid plans so the states could continue receiving the drug rebates.

That was not ideal, Paradise said, because the purpose of managed care as articulated in Kansas and elsewhere is to coordinate patient services to avoid unnecessary treatments and prevent health crises.

“Ideally you want services and care to be integrated,” Paradise said. “The fact that states have access to the rebates now also when the drugs are provided through managed care organizations makes it just as (financially) prudent for drugs to be provided through the MCOs, integrated with the rest of the care.”

Full repeal of Obamacare, which several members of the Kansas congressional delegation have advocated strongly for, would roll back that provision and prevent Kansas from collecting drug rebate money for prescriptions administered by the KanCare MCOs in the future.

While the ACA drug rebate increases sent more money to the state, the federal law also levied a new fee on insurance companies, including the three KanCare MCOs.

That, along with caseloads that are rising slowly but steadily, increased the state’s projected Medicaid costs next year above previous estimates.

Sen. Jim Denning, a Republican from Overland Park, said during a committee hearing Thursday that at least a portion of the $55 million sweep from KDHE to the state general fund will likely have to be repaid.

“It can’t be a permanent sweep,” Denning said. “We may be able to sweep it for a while, but when we get the (updated) caseloads back in April, we might have to put some of that back.”

Andy Marso is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.