JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Electronic cigarettes would have to be wrapped in child-safe packaging under a bill proposed by a Missouri House member.
State Rep. Sheila Solon of Blue Springs recently filed legislation requiring stricter packaging for vapor products. Electronic cigarettes heat liquid nicotine into an inhalable vapor, and some is flavored to taste like candy.
Lawmakers last session approved a bill to ban sales of electronic cigarettes and other alternative nicotine products to minors. But the bill faced opposition from Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, who vetoed it because of concerns that it also prevented the products from being taxed or regulated as tobacco.
Lawmakers later overrode the veto.
Federal officials have suggested a similar ban nationwide, with experts saying nicotine is especially dangerous for children.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal judge asked to rule on the legality of President Barack Obama’s changes to U.S. immigration rules is the same judge who last year criticized the government for being lenient on illegal immigration.
A lawsuit filed by 20 states to block Obama’s plan has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas. He is one of two judges there and hears half all civil cases filed in the court.
The judge wrote a scathing order last year. In it, he accused the Obama administration of helping fulfill criminal conspiracies to smuggle children across the border by reuniting them with parents living in the country illegally. He wrote the 10-page order at the conclusion of an immigrant smuggling case involving a child immigrant.
BONNER SPRINGS, Kan. (AP) — Police are seeking help to identify whoever stole items from the National Agricultural Center and Hall of Fame’s collection.
Bonner Springs police tell The Kansas City Star (http://bit.ly/1yvuD3q ) thieves broke into the center on Sept. 10 and November 5. Stolen items include an antique coin collection valued at $25,000, mantel clocks and cast iron agricultural models. Center officials say a pair of laptop computers was taken in the September break-in.
The 160-acre facility has separate museums and many exhibits that give an extensive history of farming and agriculture.
No suspects have been identified. Police are asking the public to call with information related to the thefts.
Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announces the Grand Jury decision
ALAN SCHER ZAGIER, Associated Press
ST. LOUIS (AP) — The prosecutor who oversaw the Ferguson police shooting inquiry has released additional grand jury documents after not including a law enforcement interview with a key witness in the initial public release of evidence.
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch made the additional information public Monday evening, without explanation. The new material includes transcripts of eight federal interviews of possible witnesses to Michael Brown’s shooting death in early August.
Those transcripts and the other new material weren’t among the more than 5,700 pages of documents released by McCulloch on November 24.
The first batch of documents didn’t include a transcript or a recording of a two-hour FBI and county police interview with Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown when he was shot.
KSDK-TV first reported the discrepancy.
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ALAN SCHER ZAGIER, Associated Press
ST. LOUIS (AP) — A police interview with a key witness was not provided along with the thousands of documents released after a grand jury decided to not indict a Ferguson police officer in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
An Associated Press review of the records released by St. Louis County prosecutors confirms a report by KSDK-TV that a transcript of an interview with Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown when he was shot, wasn’t included.
The two-hour interview was conducted by the FBI and a county police detective.
A spokesman for Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch said he couldn’t explain the discrepancy.
McCullough took the unusual step of releasing information shown to the grand jury once it decided that Ferguson officer Darren Wilson shouldn’t be charged for shooting Brown, who was unarmed.
A man charged with deliberately running down a Muslim teenager outside a Somali center has made his first court appearance.
Thirty-four-year-old Ahmed Aden, of Kansas City, appeared Monday in Jackson County Circuit Court where he is charged with first-degree murder, armed criminal action, leaving the scene of an accident and unlawful use of a weapon.
Prosecutors said he crashed Thursday evening into 15-year-old Abdisamad Sheikh-Hussein. The teen’s legs were nearly severed, and he died in a hospital.
Aden is being held on $250,000 bond. No attorney is listed for him in online court records.
Police said Monday that Aden was questioned in October after a vehicle with an anti-Islamic message on its back window crashed into another vehicle. Police said the case was dropped after the victims didn’t press charges.
By Jay Hancock
Kaiser Health News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Two years ago General Dynamics, one of the biggest federal contractors, reported a quarterly loss of $2 billion. An “eye-watering” result, one analyst called it.
Diminishing wars and plunging defense spending had slashed the weapons maker’s revenue and left some subsidiaries worth far less than it had paid for them. But the company already was pushing in a new direction.
Soon after Congress passed the landmark Affordable Care Act, the maker of submarines and tanks decided to expand its business related to health care. Its 2011 purchase of health-data firm Vangent instantly made it the largest contractor to Medicare and Medicaid, huge government health plans for seniors and the poor.
“They saw that their legacy defense market was going to be taking a hit,” said Sebastian Lagana, an analyst with Technology Business Research, a market research firm. “And they knew [the ACA] was going to inject funds into the health care market.”
They were right. In a way that is deeply changing Washington contracting, growth opportunities from the federal government have increasingly come not from war but from healing, an examination by Kaiser Health News and The Washington Post shows.
Politics are frozen. Budgets are tight. But business purchases by the Department of Health and Human Services have doubled to $21 billion annually in the last decade and are expected to continue rising.
HHS is now the No. 3 contracting agency, thanks to health-law spending combined with outlays for computer upgrades and Medicare’s drug program that grew during the administration of George W. Bush. HHS outranks NASA and the Department of Homeland Security in business deals and spends more than the departments of Justice, Transportation, Treasury and Agriculture combined, federal data show.
The new oil?
If health care is “the new oil,” as some investors hope, HHS is one of the richest fields — along with massive opportunities in health-related computer spending by the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Treasury.
“The DOD market is very weak,” said Steve Kelman, a Harvard management professor and contracting specialist. “The two growth markets are cybersecurity and health care. So everybody’s trying to get into those.”
The new money is buying medical-record software, insurance websites, claims processing, data analysis, computer system overhauls, consumer education and consulting expertise to control costs and identify fraud.
True, it’s a fraction of the $200 billion-plus the Pentagon spent on planes, bombs and other purchases in fiscal 2014. But thanks largely to automatic cuts set in 2011, defense contracting has dipped by more than a third since 2008 despite continuing conflict in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Few expect that to happen to health contracting — even with limited budgets and Republicans opposed to the health law controlling both sides of Congress. Analysts expect the Ebola crisis to add billions more to an HHS budget that was already expected to grow.
“It’s going to be really hard to find more money,” said Stephen Fuller, an economist at George Mason University who follows federal spending closely. “But I would think HHS is in a position to sustain their funding levels and gain some as well where other agencies are going to find it more difficult just to keep what they have.”
ACA a game-changer
The HHS contracting budget is separate from the billions the agency pays in reimbursement to caregivers of Medicare patients, its grants to states for Medicaid, and its awards through the National Institutes of Health to clinical research institutions such as the Johns Hopkins University.
Traditionally HHS vendors processed Medicare claims, made vaccines and managed information technology. HHS spending had already spiked in 2009, before the health law was passed, thanks to extraordinary purchases of H1N1 flu vaccines. But the ambitious ACA, intended to expand health coverage, overhaul payments and reengineer care —and with ample budgets to attempt all three — changed the game.
“Just because of the Affordable Care Act our health care business has probably doubled in the last five years,” said Nelson Ford, CEO of LMI Government Consulting, which helps HHS analyze and regulate the new, private insurance plans sold under the law.
The law effectively created major companies from scratch as well as growing new divisions at established businesses.
“It just occurred to me: If this bill does become law, it will be a level playing field [for contractors] and we’ll have a head start,” said Sanjay Singh, who founded Reston-based hCentive based on the Affordable Care Act’s promise. “And we can build a company.”
Today hCentive employs more than 650 people. The company built the federal government’s online marketplace for small-business health plans and is working on insurance portals for Massachusetts, New York, Colorado and Kentucky.
Business at HighPoint Global, with offices in Virginia, Maryland and Indiana, ballooned from a few million to more than $100 million annually after it landed the job of training and quality control for dozens of call centers handling questions about the insurance marketplaces, federal data show. HighPoint CEO Ben Lanius declined a request for an interview.
For contractors, profiting from the health law goes far beyond the $840 million-plus HHS has already spent on the troubled healthcare.gov portal. (This year the agency fired CGI Federal, the site’s primary contractor, and replaced it with Accenture. HHS contracted with CGI for work worth $339 million the last two years; with Accenture, $192 million in contracts, records show.)
Defense giant Serco has done more than $400 million worth of business with HHS in the past two years, records show, much of it for collecting paper insurance applications that surged when the online marketplaces failed.
HHS’ innovation lab, with a $10 billion budget over a decade, is hiring research firms such as Mathematica to test alternatives to traditional, “fee for service” medicine that encourages unnecessary procedures. The ACA also furnished an extra $350 million to hire cyber sleuths to fight Medicare fraud.
A related law, the HITECH Act of 2009, steered another $30 billion via Medicare reimbursements to spur hospitals and doctors to buy medical-record software from private industry.
New opportunity
For traditional defense contractors, health care isn’t the new oil. It’s the new F-35 fighter or Zumwalt-class destroyer.
“This is a pretty exciting time to be in the federal health IT space,” said Horace Blackman, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of health and life sciences. “The biggest opportunities I would point to are efforts associated with the Affordable Care Act.”
While Lockheed has run HHS computers for a long time, its business with the agency has increased by more than half since 2006 to $300 million annually, according to federal records.
The company won part of a $15 billion data management contract from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2012, along with Accenture, CGI Federal and others. It’s bidding with many others on another giant health job — an $11 billion Pentagon contract to modernize the military’s computer medical records.
Defense vendors are recycling products from battlefield to bedside. Lockheed says it converted missile-defense software into a hospital tool for the early identification of sepsis, a life-threatening response by the body to infection.
“We’re seeing a lot of these companies quietly repositioning and reusing their legacy capabilities,” said John Caucis, a senior analyst with Technology Business Research.
Along with cybersecurity smarts, Washington employers especially prize health analytics skills, recruiters say.
“We have 200 epidemiologists. We have clinical statisticians. We have physicians. We have nurses,” said Amy Caro, head of the health division at Northrop Grumman, better known for its B-2 stealth bomber.
Among other HHS work, Northrop manages data sharing for the National Institutes of Health, helped launch the health law’s accountable care organizations to control costs and improve care, and turned telecommunications software into a Medicare fraud detector.
Acquisitions
The quickest way to acquire a particular expertise needed by HHS, some contractors have found, is often to mimic General Dynamics and buy somebody already doing the work.
In October Xerox said it acquired Consilience Software, maker of patient case-management and disease-surveillance programs for government agencies. The same month defense and intelligence giant Booz Allen Hamilton said it bought the health division of Genova Technologies, a tech company that has done $90 million in HHS business since the health law was passed, according to federal records.
The deal is part of a larger push by Booz, majority owned by the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, to sell technology services and consulting to HHS.
Its yearly business with the agency has quadrupled in the last decade to $170 million even as its overall revenue from the federal government has shrunk, according to contracting data. (However, the extent of Booz’s government work is unclear because its jobs for spy agencies don’t show up in official records, contracting specialists say.)
This summer Booz won part of a huge (potentially $7 billion) job to help HHS’ innovation lab design, run and evaluate tests to improve care results and control costs. Other awardees include RTI International, a nonprofit; Deloitte, a consulting firm; the Lewin Group, a consultancy owned by insurer UnitedHealth Group; and Truven Health Analytics, a research shop owned by private equity investors Veritas Capital.
Booz officials did not respond to repeated requests for interviews.
Health care acquisitions by defense contractors don’t always work smoothly. In 2011 General Dynamics paid Veritas nearly $1 billion for Vangent, a seller of health information technology and business services.
General Dynamics did not make executives available for interviews. But the deal did not go as well as the company hoped, as Vangent’s corporate culture clashed with that of the buyer, said Technology Business Research’s Lagana. Part of General Dynamics’ $2 billion quarterly loss at the end of 2012 was — ironically — related not to defense but to Vangent and its health-care work, he said.
But thanks to Vangent, the company got the task of staffing call centers to explain healthcare.gov to consumers. That job became bigger than anybody imagined when the site crashed during insurance enrollment a year ago. General Dynamics ended up hiring 8,000, mostly temporary workers to run hotlines for Obamacare as well as Medicare.
This year healthcare.gov is working better, by many accounts. Enrollment began Nov. 15. Again General Dynamics has been hiring to answer the phones. The company’s $815 million in spending commitments from HHS made it the agency’s top contractor for fiscal 2014, not counting vaccine makers.
And because its call-center jobs are “cost-plus” contracts, every hire comes with a built-in profit.
Jay Hancock is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.
JEFFERSON CITY (AP) – Wealthy political activist Rex Sinquefield has donated $1 million for Bev Randles to explore running for Missouri lieutenant governor.
Sinquefield donated to the conservative Club for Growth chairwoman the day she announced she’ll be testing her chances with an exploratory committee.
The money is the most Sinquefield has given to a single candidate in one chunk since at least 2008.
The donation comes the same day lawmakers discussed changes to Missouri ethics and campaign finance law.
Claims that Attorney General Chris Koster was influenced by lobbyist perks and campaign contributions spurred debate among lawmakers on how to reduce the appearance of conflicts of interest.
But some Missouri political scientists have questioned whether there’s enough momentum to pass effective changes in a state some call the “wild west” of campaign finance.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Business may have good reason to celebrate the coming year.
The National Association for Business Economics says it expects a stronger job market and falling oil prices to lead to the fastest U.S. economic growth in a decade in 2015.
The NABE says it expects the overall economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, to expand by 3.1 percent next year. That would be the strongest GDP growth since 2005 when the economy grew 3.3 percent.
The 2007-2009 recession was the worst downturn since the 1930s, and the economy has struggled to regain its footing. The NABE forecasters believe growth this year will average an anemic 2.2 percent, matching last year’s performance.
NABE President John Silvia, the chief economist at Wells Fargo, said NABE is also forecasting that inflation will remain restrained in 2015.
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Some lawmakers investigating claims of lobbyist influence on Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster say he acted appropriately.
Koster defended his actions against companies being sued by the state during a committee hearing Monday.
The Democrat came under scrutiny following a New York Times article alleging he and other attorneys general were soft on companies after receiving campaign contributions and perks from lobbyists.
He calls some of those claims ludicrous and says others stemmed from staffers missing deadlines to file multistate lawsuits.
Republican Chair State Rep. Jay Barnes says Koster acted correctly but gave the appearance of misconduct.
Other lawmakers have responded by proposing changes to Missouri ethics laws, including banning legislators from accepting lobbyist gifts.
Bills also have been filed to limit campaign contributions
