LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Lawrence police have arrested a 53-year-old man who they say stole video game systems and three pounds of chicken during a series of home burglaries.

The Lawrence Journal-World reports  Ricky McConnell was being held at the Douglas County jail on Wednesday morning. He is charged with three counts of aggravated burglary and two counts of attempted theft.

Sgt. Trent McKinley says officers caught McConnell in a Lawrence home on Tuesday. He says they found McConnell hiding behind a door with three video game consoles, 42 video games and the bag of chicken. McKinley says McConnell is linked to other burglaries in the area.

Online jail records didn’t indicate an attorney for McConnell. He is being held on $40,000 bond.

By Julie Rovner
Kaiser Health News

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Exactly what would happen to the Affordable Care Act if the Supreme Court invalidates tax credits in the three dozen states – including Kansas – where the federal government runs the program?

Legal scholars say a decision like that would deal a potentially lethal blow to the law because it would undermine the government-run insurance marketplaces that are its backbone, as well as the mandate requiring most Americans to carry coverage.

In King v. Burwell, the law’s challengers argue that Congress intended to limit federal tax credits to residents of states running their own insurance exchanges. Currently only 13 states and the District of Columbia operate exchanges on their own; another 10 are in some sort of partnership with the federal government. Federal officials run the rest.

The court is slated to hear the case in early 2015. Should it find that subsidies in federally run exchanges are not allowed, “I don’t think there are any rosy scenarios,” said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and a supporter of the law. “It’s a complete disaster.”

The immediate impact is that the Internal Revenue Service would stop paying subsidies to those in federally run exchanges. In 2014, more than 4.6 million people were getting those subsidies, but the number may grow to as many as 13.4 million by 2016, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation).

Most of those who lose subsidies would no longer be required by the “individual mandate” to have insurance, because they would fall into an exemption in the law for those who have to pay more than 8 percent of family income for health insurance premiums.

“Since a lot of people can’t afford insurance without the tax credits, you’re looking at a lot of people shedding coverage,” said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

Those who hang on to their coverage and pay the entire premium without help “are likely to be sicker on average than the people who shed their coverage because they’re the ones who need insurance the most,” he said.

Indeed, the insurance industry, through its trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, argued in a legal brief for a related case that the elimination of the federal exchange subsidies could seriously undermine those markets, creating an insurance death spiral.

“When healthy individuals opt out of the individual insurance market, those who are left are, on average, less healthy (and therefore prone to higher-than-average medical expenses),” AHIP said in its brief. “A sicker pool of consumers results in higher premiums, which causes an additional relatively healthy subset of participants to drop out, which in turn results in a further increase in premiums.”

Eliminating subsidies for individuals also would eliminate the so-called “employer mandate” that seeks to require larger firms to provide coverage. That’s because the employer mandate merely requires employers to pay a fine if their employees obtain subsidies on the exchange. If there are no subsidies, there are no employer fines and, effectively, no mandate.

Meanwhile, said Jost, “hospitals that have started to have some real relief from uncompensated care are right back taking care of uninsured people.” That problem could get worse because some people who had coverage in the old, unreformed individual market might have to drop it due to cost.

So what could be done? Some argue that states that rely on the federal government to run their health exchanges could establish their own marketplaces. But legal experts say that’s problematic as well.

“The practical obstacle is that creating an exchange is not child’s play,” Bagley said. “An exchange has to be a governmental entity or a nonprofit entity. They’ve got to be able to carry out a variety of functions,” including working with consumer assistance groups and overseeing compliance with the law’s requirements.

While some have suggested that states could create a “virtual” exchange on paper and contract with the federal government to run it, Bagley said the law on the subject is pretty explicit. “States would have to do more than just the bare minimum,” he said.

Timing and financing would also pose practical problems. The final deadline for states to apply for federal funding to establish an exchange has passed. And a decision from the Supreme Court is likely to come in late June of next year, which is after another deadline (June 15) for states to use their own funds to establish an exchange in time for the 2015-16 open enrollment season.

The political obstacles are potentially even bigger. In six states, even if a governor wanted to establish an exchange for his or her state, the state legislature has specifically taken away that authority, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Georgia became the seventh state earlier this year.

“What that means is that in many of these states that don’t have exchanges, state legislatures will have to get involved,” said Bagley. And many of those legislatures “are full of new members after the midterm elections who specifically campaigned against the ACA.”

Still, some say the predictions of doom are overblown.

The main thing an anti-subsidy ruling would do is force Congress back onto the playing field to reopen the law, said health economist Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute.

“Congress will step in,” he said. “We’re going to have the kind of political give and take which was abbreviated and artificially truncated when the law was passed. It’s not a pretty process, but that’s why we have a government and we elect people.”

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

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — A weekend fire that led to the evacuation of more than 20 dogs from a Lawrence pet care business also caused $60,000 in damages.

The Lawrence Journal-World  reports that the Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical department has deemed the fire accidental. In a press release, the department confirmed the fire at Christal K-9 was caused by an electrical malfunction of a box fan.

Twenty-one dogs were saved from the building when emergency responders arrived. Officials said one dog died at the scene and a second dog died from its injuries on Sunday. Several other dogs remain in treatment.

The business provides grooming, training and boarding services for pets.

MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials say the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks, so parents of baby boys should consider it and health insurers should pay for it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released draft guidelines on circumcision and said it will receive public comments for the next 45 days before finalizing them.

These are the first federal guidelines on circumcision. The CDC started working on the guidelines about seven years ago, when a cluster of influential studies in Africa indicated circumcision might help stop the spread of the AIDS virus.

Circumcision involves cutting away foreskin around the tip of the penis. Germs can grow underneath the foreskin, and CDC officials say the procedure can lower a male’s risk of sexually-transmitted diseases, penile cancer and even urinary tract infections.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that science standards for Kansas public schools promote atheism and violate the religious freedoms of students and parents.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree ruled Tuesday that a nonprofit group and individuals challenging the standards did not claim specific enough injuries to allow the case to go forward.

The State Board of Education last year adopted standards developed by Kansas, 25 other states and the National Research Council. The guidelines treat both evolution and climate change as key scientific concepts.

The lawsuit was filed by Citizens for Objective Public Education, a group based in the small town of Peck. Parents and taxpayers joined the group.

Crabtree noted that even with the standards, local school districts still control what’s taught in classrooms.

MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Chief Justice John Roberts says in a Supreme Court argument that federal prosecutors are using part of the federal bank robbery law to “extort” a guilty plea from defendants.

The comment Tuesday from the conservative lawyer and former Justice Department official is the latest criticism of federal prosecutors that Roberts has voiced recently.

Roberts spoke from the bench during an argument over imposing a mandatory 10-year minimum prison term on a suspect who forces someone to accompany him during the robbery or in trying to flee. The justices were wrestling with whether the distance traveled matters in figuring out whether the provision applies.

Roberts wrote the court’s opinion in June holding that prosecutors overreached in convicting a woman involved in a love triangle under an anti-chemical weapons law.

By Andy Marso
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — When diabetes began to steal her mother’s legs and vision three decades ago, Lawrence resident Judy Bellome and her family joined the ranks of thousands of caregivers across Kansas.

Bellome had advantages others don’t, but even so she found it challenging.

“If I hadn’t been a nurse — and my sister is a physical therapist — there’s a very good chance we would not have been giving my mother the right insulin doses,” said Bellome, former CEO of the Douglas County Visiting Nurses Association. “Because nobody trained us.”

Bellome has added her voice to an effort by the senior advocacy group AARP Kansas to pass a bill requiring hospitals to demonstrate follow-up care instructions for caregivers before their loved ones are sent home.
605,000 Kansas family caregivers

AARP Kansas leaders hope to introduce the Caregiver Advise, Record, Enable (CARE) Act in the upcoming legislative session. The bill is still in draft form, but it is intended to allow patients to designate a caregiver upon admission to the hospital.
Hospital staff would then be required to notify that caregiver if the patient is to be discharged to another care facility or home. If the patient is being sent home, the hospital must “provide an explanation and live instruction of the medical tasks” that will have to be performed at home.

“Family caregivers are also required to undertake tasks that were once in the domain of only doctors and nurses,” AARP Kansas Director Maren Turner said. “Complex medication management, wound care, injections. Yet, most receive little or no training for these duties.”

Turner’s group celebrated November as National Family Caregivers Month. There are 605,000 Kansans looking after an aging spouse, family member or friend, the group said, providing unpaid medical care with an estimated value of $4.1 million.

There are 42 million family caregivers nationwide, according to AARP.

“Other states in our AARP network are working on caregiving issues, but ours will be Kansas-specific,” Mary Tritsch, associate director of communications for AARP Kansas, said of the CARE Act.

Financial incentives for hospitals

The Legislature reconvenes in January, and AARP Kansas has been meeting with some legislators to brief them on the proposal.
Rep. Barbara Bollier, a Republican from Mission Hills who is also a retired physician, said she has asked legislative research staff for more information on what state law currently requires when it comes to discharging patients from the hospital.

She said the Missouri hospital where she worked had protocols in place to ensure safe discharge.

Bollier said she did not know if those protocols were standardized across Kansas’ health care system, but Medicare provides financial incentives for hospitals nationwide to discharge patients safely by penalizing quick readmissions.

While she respects the goal of AARP Kansas proposal, Bollier said she wants to investigate further to see if changing the law is the right path to reach it. Hospital data can help determine whether the current system is truly leaving discharged patients without the level of care they need, she said.

“You really have to look at outcomes data,” Bollier said.

Connected by caregiving

The early phase of the AARP legislative push has focused largely on the anecdotes of people like Bellome, whose mother, Eleanor Francis, was diagnosed with diabetes in the 1980s at age 70.

For a while Francis was able to manage the condition through changes to her diet, Bellome said. But after extensive walking during a church trip to China, she returned to the United States with a sore that never healed because her circulation was compromised. Her leg had to be amputated, and insulin injections were prescribed.

Francis also had worked as a nurse, so Bellome said the hospital staff assumed she could handle her written discharge instructions.

But Bellome said her mother had been retired for years and her vision was failing.

“She had a can-do attitude. So you tell her to do something and, by golly, she’s going to do it,” Bellome said. “And what happened was she went home and she wasn’t able to give herself the injections.”

Bellome and her sister served as their mother’s caregiver for much of the next three years, until she died of a heart attack shortly after her 75th birthday.

The experience, Bellome said, connected her to hundreds of thousands of Kansans.

“Just about everybody has either been a caregiver or received care or will be a caregiver,” Bellome said. “It’s a very common characteristic that’s going to bind us all together.”

 

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

JUNCTION CITY – A Fort Riley soldier, James G. Henning, has been charged in Geary County District Court with five counts of Sexual Exploitation of a Child, two counts Aggravated Criminal Sodomy, and one count of Aggravated Indecent Liberties With a Child.

The Geary County Attorney’s Office confirmed the formal complaint containing the charges against Henning was filed Tuesday in District Court.
Bond for Henning remains at five million dollars.

Henning was arrested Nov. 25 by Junction City police at his residence in connection with the alleged distribution of child pornography.

The County Attorney’s Office confirmed a new status hearing has been scheduled for 9 a.m. Dec. 30 in District Court as requested by the defense.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A judge has found sufficient evidence to try a man and woman in the abduction and rape of an 8-year-old girl in Topeka.

The Topeka Capital-Journal  reports that 28-year-old Jeremy Lindsey and 23-year-old Michelle Harris were bound over for trial Tuesday in Shawnee County District Court. The girl vanished for about six hours in September, setting off a large search that ended when she was found walking along a road about two miles from her home.

Lindsey will be tried on 10 charges, including rape, aggravated kidnapping and unlawful administration of a substance to the child. Harris was accused of transporting Lindsey and the girl to an abandoned house. She will be tried on charges of aggravated kidnapping and aggravated child endangerment.

Lindsey and Harris pleaded not guilty.