KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has signed a bill aimed at stopping an economic border war with Kansas.

Whether the bill signed Tuesday has any impact depends on Kansas officials.

We joined Senator @MikeCierpiot, Rep. Jeff Coleman, and Joe Reardon of @kcchamber in Kansas City’s Union Station to sign SB 182 — ending the unnecessary “boarder wars” with Kansas City, Kansas. This is great for BOTH states, but especially great for taxpayers! pic.twitter.com/aUSjluwW3k

— Governor Mike Parson (@GovParsonMO) June 11, 2019

Both states have spent millions of dollars luring businesses across the state line in the last decade.

The Kansas City Star reports the bill would stop Missouri from offering tax incentives to companies moving into the state from Wyandotte, Miami and Johnson counties in Kansas. It it takes effect only if Kansas does the same thing before 2021 for companies in Jackson, Platte, Clay or Cass counties in Missouri.

Parson said he and Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly have discussed the issue and he is optimistic an agreement will be reached.

Kelly said in a statement Tuesday the states need to work together to lure businesses to the region.

By JOHN HANNA

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas Democrats plan to have voters rank candidates rather than pick only one in a presidential primary set for May 2020.

The party is moving away from its more traditional caucuses, trying ranked-choice voting and allowing mail ballots to boost participation, State Chairwoman Vicki Hiatt said Tuesday. The state party has submitted its plans for the May 2 balloting to the Democratic National Committee for its approval.

About 39,000 people participated in Kansas Democrats’ presidential caucuses in 2016, an unusually large turnout that resulted in a 2-to-1 victory for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders over eventual presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Some meetings took several hours, discouraging participation, particularly if rural voters faced long drives to get to caucus sites, Hiatt said.

“People did not want to do that again,” Hiatt said. “It just ended up being a little chaotic.”

Kansas had state-financed presidential primaries in 1980 and 1992, with county and state election officials overseeing the voting. In both years, more than 160,000 Democrats and 210,000 Republicans cast ballots.

A Kansas law called for a state-run primary every four years after 1992, but the Legislature kept canceling it because of the potential cost. Legislators repealed the law in 2015, leaving it to the political parties to decide how handle the voting.

Hiatt said the 2020 primary could cost the state Democratic Party $200,000, depending on the turnout. But she said the party also could get financial support from groups that promote ranked-choice voting.

“We’re really going to be doing a lot of robust fundraising,” she said.

The state Republican Party hasn’t decided what it will do in 2020, state Chairman Mike Kuckelman said. With President Donald Trump expected to be nominated again easily, some Republicans talked earlier this year of forgoing caucuses and having a state convention pick delegates to the GOP National Convention.

The GOP had caucuses in 2016 but set them up so that voters could arrive after candidate rallies and speeches and simply cast their ballots and leave quickly. About 73,000 Republicans participated, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz scoring a decisive victory over Trump.

Democrats stuck in 2016 to a more traditional caucus format. After listening to speeches, participants gathered in groups by the candidates they preferred and were counted. Candidates who didn’t receive 15% were eliminated, and the participants regrouped.

With the planned primary, voters would rank every candidate on the ballot. If a candidate does not receive 15% percent of the vote, his or her votes would be redistributed based on the voters’ second choices. That process would continue until all the remaining candidates had at least 15%, and delegates to the Democratic National Convention would be awarded proportionally.

___

BELLEFONTAINE NEIGHBORS, Mo. (AP) — Court documents say a couple left their child home alone while they robbed a bank in suburban St. Louis.

40-year-old Melissa Harrison and 33-year-old Ramon Alonzo Gregory Falls are charged with stealing or attempted stealing from a U.S. Bank in Bellefontaine Neighbors and child abuse. No attorney is listed for them in online court records.

Charges say Harrison handed a teller a note Saturday demanding money and that Falls drove the getaway vehicle. But the teller inserted a tracking device into the money-filled envelope, and the couple was arrested after a chase.

Investigators later found that the couple’s child home alone for more than six hours with no running water or food. Charges say the child was “covered in dirt, in soiled underwear, and extremely hungry.”

NEW YORK (AP) — A group of state attorneys general led by New York and California filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday to block T-Mobile’s $26.5 billion bid for Sprint, citing consumer harm.

The state attorneys general said the promised benefits, such as better networks in rural areas and faster service overall, cannot be verified, while eliminating a major wireless company will immediately harm consumers by reducing competition and driving up prices for cellphone service.

The T-Mobile/Sprint merger would cause irreplaceable harm to millions of subscribers nationwide, particularly affecting low-income & communities of color.

It's exactly the sort of consumer-harming, job-killing megamerger our antitrust laws were designed to prevent. #MegaBlock pic.twitter.com/XfO68fShoy

— NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) June 11, 2019

New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement that combining the two companies would reduce access to affordable, reliable wireless service nationwide and would particularly affect lower-income and minority communities in New York and other urban areas.

Other attorneys general joining Tuesday’s lawsuit are from Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Virginia and Wisconsin. All 10 attorneys general are Democrats. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in New York.

The lawsuit is an unusual step by state officials ahead of a decision by federal antitrust authorities. The Justice Department’s decision is pending. The Republican majority of the Federal Communications Commission supports the deal , though the agency has yet to vote.

Too many “mega mergers have sailed through the governmental approval process,” so it’s up to the states to “step up,” James said at a news conference.

“There’s no rule or regulation that we have to wait for the DOJ,” she said. She added the attorneys general will “continue to litigate whether the DOJ approves the merger or not.”

Diana Moss, the president of the American Antitrust Institute and an advocate for tougher antitrust enforcement, said the states’ lawsuit could signal to other potential merger partners that there would be tougher enforcement from states even if the federal government permitted deals to go through.

James said Tuesday that her office’s renewed focus on mergers and anti-competitiveness goes beyond the tech industry, though she did not elaborate.

T-Mobile and Sprint have argued that they need to bulk up to upgrade to a fast, powerful “5G” mobile network that competes with Verizon and AT&T. The companies are appealing to President Donald Trump’s desire for the U.S. to “win” a global 5G race.

Consumer advocates, labor unions and many Democratic lawmakers worry that the deal could mean job cuts, higher wireless prices and a hit to the rural cellphone market.

Amanda Wait, an antitrust lawyer and former Federal Trade Commission lawyer, said states are acting because they disagree with what they have seen the federal government doing.

“They see the FCC accepting certain remedies and concessions that don’t, in their minds, solve the problem,” she said.

T-Mobile declined comment. Sprint and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

One famous example of when the states and federal government diverged on a big antitrust case was in the fight against Microsoft, although that was not a merger case. Several states dissented from the Justice Department’s settlement roughly 20 years ago, pushing for tougher sanctions to curtail Microsoft’s ability to use its dominance in the Windows operating system to thwart competition in other technologies.

More recently, in the Bayer-Monsanto agribusiness merger, five states last year criticized the federal government’s approval.

T-Mobile and Sprint previously tried to combine during the Obama administration but regulators rebuffed them. They resumed talks on combining once Trump took office, hoping for more industry-friendly regulators.

T-Mobile has a reputation for consumer-friendly changes to the cellphone industry. T-Mobile and Sprint led the return of unlimited-data cellphone plans, for example.

T-Mobile, trying to reassure critics, promised the FCC it would build out a 5G network and invest in rural broadband on a specific timeframe or pay penalties. It also promised to sell off Sprint’s prepaid Boost Mobile brand and keep price increases on hold for three years.

That was enough for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to back thedeal. The other two Republican commissioners indicated they would join him.

But public-interest advocates said these conditions did not address concerns about higher prices and reduced competition— and would be difficult for regulators to enforce.

The Justice Department evaluates deals using stricter criteria than the FCC’s “public interest” standard — namely whether they harm competition and raise prices for consumers. Staff attorneys at DOJ have reportedly told the companies they won’t approve the deal as proposed, but the ultimate decision lies with Makan Delrahim, the top antitrust official who is a political appointee.

The state attorneys general said in Tuesday’s lawsuit that combining Sprint and T-Mobile would make the industry as a whole — Verizon and AT&T, too — less likely to offer plans and services that consumers like. And they say the companies have already been working to roll out 5G and don’t need to combine to do so.

Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank owns Sprint, while Germany’s Deutsche Telekom owns T-Mobile.

By CELIA LLOPIS-JEPSEN 

Kansas can no longer put off care for Medicaid patients with hepatitis C because of a recent legal settlement. But hundreds of the state’s prison inmates not covered by that lawsuit will have to wait another year for the pricey treatment.

That raises concerns about whether the delay constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the U.S. Constitution, civil rights lawyers say, because inmates have the right to medical care.

“This is a fairly clear Eighth Amendment violation,” said Lauren Bonds, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas, which brought the Medicaid lawsuit. “Delayed treatment is unconstitutional.”

Kansas prison officials say more than 700 inmates currently have hepatitis C, a virus that attacks the liver and that’s most commonly contracted by sharing needles to inject illegal drugs. The state Department of Corrections expects about half will receive treatment this year, starting with those who’ve developed liver cirrhosis from the virus.

That’s on top of about 100 inmates treated in recent months, agency spokeswoman Jeanny Sharp said.

“The treatment strategy,” she said, “aligns with what many other states that were sued were asked to do.”

Kansas, she said, is doing it voluntarily.

Legal challenges

States landed in legal hot water in recent years for limiting hepatitis C treatment for their Medicaid and prison populations in response to the sky-high cost of new drugs. The drugs offered highly effective treatment to clear infections up, but with price tags that could total nearly $100,000 per person.

Kansas settled the Medicaid lawsuit, agreeing to no longer limit coverage of hepatitis C medication to those with more advanced liver scarring, while forcing others to wait.

Read the state’s settlement with the ACLU over Hep C coverage.

The suit didn’t cover prisons, but last fall, Kansas began screening all inmates for hepatitis C.

The corrections department says costs vary, but tend to run between $15,000 and $17,000 to treat the typical inmate. That can involve several months of daily medication.

The state will spend $6 million in fiscal 2020 on treating about half of its inmates with hepatitis C, a corrections official last week told a meeting of state leaders charged with signing off on the expense. Gov. Laura Kelly and the legislative leaders agreed unanimously.

Waiting for treatment

As it stands, inmates with less advanced hepatitis C will need to wait until fiscal 2021.

The corrections department wanted more funding to treat them this year instead, but the governor’s office didn’t request the full amount from the Legislature.

A spokeswoman said Tuesday Kelly is committed to ensuring inmates get treatment.

The state “will move as quickly as possible to treat every prisoner affected,” Dena Sattler wrote, “and if additional funding is required to keep providing treatment before the next fiscal year, the Governor will make additional budget recommendations as necessary.”

More inmates are testing positive for hepatitis C than initially estimated — about 13 percent of people entering the prison system.

It can take years for the outward signs and symptoms of the virus to develop, such as jaundice and fatigue.

About one in four people who get hepatitis C fend it off naturally. For most, the disease takes its toll, causing chronic infections.

As many as one in five eventually develop cirrhosis and one in 20 get liver cancer. Some cases require liver transplants.

Studies suggest early hepatitis C treatment benefits patients, while delaying treatment can harm their long-term health.

The costs of hepatitis C treatment are just one of the woes the corrections department is juggling. It’s struggled, for example, to pay guards well enough to keep prisons adequately staffed.

Bonds, of the ACLU, wouldn’t rule out heading back to court to press for speedier hepatitis C treatment in prisons. At the same time, she said the ACLU understands the system is facing budgetary hurdles.

“We do want to recognize and at least acknowledge that there has been some progress made,” she said. “We do want to be reasonable and see if there is a non-litigation means to get prisoners treated more quickly.”

The ACLU is continuing to monitor hepatitis C treatment for Medicaid patients, too. Under the terms of the state’s settlement with the group, Kansas agreed to hand over quarterly updates on how many patients are prescribed treatment and whether their requests get approved.

Previously, the state’s privatized Medicaid program, KanCare, approved only patients with the most serious liver scarring. It made them pass extensive sobriety tests, too.

The settlement says Kansas can only impose a three-month drug-free period instead of six, and that it can’t reject patients for using alcohol or illegal drugs that aren’t taken by needle.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @Celia_LJ 

GEARY COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating a fatal stabbing and have a suspect in custody.

Just before 9:30p.m. Monday, police responded to the 100 Block of East Vine Street in Junction City, according to a media release. At the scene, police found 55-year-old Eddie Starks of Junction City with a stab wound. EMS transported Starts to a Topeka hospital where he died.

Police arrested Vondra Brown, 49, Junction City, on requested charges of 2nd degree murder. Police released no additional details early Tuesday.