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.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The Mormon church and other faiths are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and settle the question of whether states can outlaw gay marriage once and for all.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in a statement Friday, said it joined a friend-of-the-court brief asking the high court to hear Utah’s marriage case.

Also taking part in the filing were the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Ethics & Religious Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Each teaches that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Multiple organizations and governmental entities on both sides of the debate have filed similar briefs asking the court to take up the issue.

 

JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is defending his decision to delay taking executive action on immigration until after November’s congressional elections.

In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Obama denies that his decision was political. He blamed the altered timetable on the immigration crisis this summer in which tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children crossed into the U.S. through Mexico.

Obama had earlier pledged to take action by the end of the summer. But he has been under pressure from Democrats nervous about how any action taken before November would affect their campaigns.

In the interview airing Sunday, Obama says he still intends to act if Congress does not.

He says delay will allow him to explain to the public why executive action is right for the country.

HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) — Republican Sen. Pat Roberts touted his experience and his party ties during his first debate with a surprisingly strong independent campaign challenger for his seat.

Roberts went on the offensive against 45-year-old businessman Greg Orman from the outset of Saturday’s debate at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson. The race has become surprisingly competitive and could affect the broader fight for control of the Senate.

The 78-year-old three-term senator said he’s the only candidate with proven experience and the only one working against Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Orman said he’ll focus on solving problems, not partisan politics. Orman has promised to caucus with whatever party holds the majority.

Roberts has overhauled his campaign and the race was roiled this week by the Democrat’s attempted withdrawal.

 

United State’s Attorney’s Office

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – Tammy Dickinson, United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, announced today that a Lebanon, Mo., automobile dealer has been indicted by a federal grand jury for a mail fraud scheme in which he sold dozens of vehicles with fraudulent titles that greatly underreported the actual mileage of the vehicles.

Kenneth W. Smith, 60, of Lebanon, was charged in a seven-count indictment returned under seal by a federal grand jury in Springfield, Mo., on Aug. 26, 2014. That indictment has been unsealed and made public upon Smith’s arrest and initial court appearance.

Smith operates Cars Unlimited in Lebanon. According to today’s indictment, Smith obtained fraudulent replacement titles for dozens of vehicles that were sold by Cars Unlimited between February 2010 and Nov. 7, 2011. Smith (operating through Cars Unlimited) allegedly applied for and received 54 replacement titles from the state of Missouri, each of which underreported the vehicle’s actual mileage between 95,000 and 209,000 miles. Smith allegedly resold these 54 vehicles at auto auctions using the fraudulent replacement titles. These 54 vehicles were sold for an aggregate total of approximately $346,450.

Beginning in February 2010, when Smith purchased vehicles (through Cars Unlimited) at auto auctions, the vehicle titles he received showed each vehicle’s actual mileage. After purchasing a vehicle, Smith allegedly submitted an “Application for Missouri Title and License” seeking a replacement title for the vehicle. Although he sought a replacement title, the indictment says, he in fact possessed the original title for the vehicle.

In each of those instances, Smith allegedly forged the signatures of the previous owner of the vehicle. The state of Missouri prepared a replacement title that was mailed to Smith at Cars Unlimited.

The federal indictment charges Smith with seven counts of mail fraud.

Dickinson cautioned that the charges contained in this indictment are simply accusations, and not evidence of guilt. Evidence supporting the charges must be presented to a federal trial jury, whose duty is to determine guilt or innocence.

This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Milligan. It was investigated by the FBI and the Missouri Department of Revenue.

By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service

TOPEKA — Out of the 8,000 full- and part-time law enforcement officers in Kansas, only 1 in 4 have been trained to handle crisis calls involving the mentally ill.

Records show that 80 percent of the nearly 1,800 trained officers work in four high-population counties: Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Wyandotte.

The other 20 percent – about 360 officers – are spread across police and sheriff’s departments in the remaining 101 counties.

“We’re trying to address that,” said Rick Cagan, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Kansas. “It makes sense to have most of your crisis-trained officers in your metropolitan areas, because that’s where you have the most people. But at the same time, we have a lot of areas in the state that don’t have someone on their staff who’s been trained.”

Since 2007, NAMI Kansas has coordinated annual conferences that link police and sheriff’s departments with mental health officials in their communities to form crisis intervention teams (CIT).

The need for – or a consequence of not having – crisis intervention training was underscored last month when Ottawa police officers shot and killed 18-year-old Joseph Jennings during an Aug. 23 parking lot altercation outside the Orscheln Farm & Home store.

Cagan said he has no record of Ottawa police taking the crisis intervention course. Ottawa and Franklin County law enforcement officials did not respond to KHI News Services calls seeking comment.

‘Never got a break’

Jennings’ aunt, Brandy Smith, said her nephew suffered seizures that often led him to feel depressed, delusional and suicidal.

“He had them when he was a little kid,” Smith said. “He stopped having them when he was about 9, but they’d started up again when he was about 14 or 15.”

Since aging out of the state’s foster care system in December, Jennings had been living off and on with Smith and her husband, Billy, and with his grandmother, Charlene Smith. Jennings had lived in foster homes since he was 11.
“He was just a really good kid who never got a break,” Brandy Smith said. “I love him like a son.”

Smith said that four days before the shooting, Jennings was hospitalized for a seizure that “lasted an hour and a half.”

At home three days later, he attempted suicide. “It was a drug overdose,” Smith said. “He’d taken all his pills, like 10 trazodone (an antidepressant) and 50 Ativan (for anxiety), all at once.”

Jennings spent that night in the psychiatric unit at Ransom Memorial Hospital. “He was discharged the next day at 4:20 p.m.,” Smith said. “We brought him home, he took a nap, he got up and he asked me for his keys because he wanted to go for a ride – he loved his motorcycle.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you wait a while?’” Smith said. “He said OK, sat down on the couch next to me, put his arm around me and told me that he loved me. I told him I loved him too. He said, ‘Do you forgive me?’ and I said I did. I don’t know why he asked me that.”

A few minutes later, she said, Jennings rode his motorcycle around the block. When he returned he was upset.

“His bike had broken down and he couldn’t get it started, which really got him agitated,” she said. “I said, ‘It’s OK, we’ll get it fixed. Go for a walk. Calm down,’ and I went in to start dinner. The next thing I know, my husband runs in and says, ‘They’re getting ready to shoot Joe in the parking lot!’”

Smith said she ran barefoot to the Orscheln parking lot, which is about a block from her house. “I was screaming at them (police) at the top of my lungs: ‘Don’t shoot him! He’s suicidal! That’s Joseph Jennings! Don’t shoot him!’”

After the shooting, Ottawa law enforcement officials said officers had responded to a report of an armed man in the Orscheln parking lot. Police have neither confirmed nor denied that Jennings was armed. They’ve also not indicated how many times he was shot.

Smith said she and her husband don’t own a gun and that Jennings had never indicated that he owned a gun.

“I was there and I didn’t see a gun. My husband was there and he didn’t see a gun,” she said. “There were other witnesses there, and none of them have come to us and said they saw a gun. This happened in broad daylight. But I’m not going to argue with them (police) because I don’t know what they saw.”

Smith said the shooting occurred between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Two of the policemen involved in the shooting, she said, had visited with Jennings prior to his hospitalizations earlier in the week.

“They had to have known who he was and that he was not alright,” she said. “But I don’t want this to be about that. I want this to be about police officers getting the knowledge and training they need so that this doesn’t happen again and no other family has to go through what we’ve been through.”

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation is investigating the events leading up to Jennings’ death.

“Our Crime Scene Response team was called to Ottawa on Saturday (Aug. 23) evening and worked through Sunday afternoon,” said Mark Malick, KBI special agent in charge of investigations. Another KBI team was called in to investigate the incident with the Ottawa Police Department and Franklin County Sheriff’s Office.

Often a matter of money

It’s unclear how much the crisis intervention training is likely to cost a small city’s or rural county’s law enforcement agencies.

“Like a lot of things, it all comes down to money,” said Jim Kramer, president of the Kansas Sheriffs’ Association. “Your smaller (law enforcement) departments can’t afford it, and it’s not something they use every day so it’s not in the limelight of the (county) commissioners or the (city) councils when it comes time to put your budget together.”

Kramer, who was chief of police in Cimarron for 18 years before becoming Gray County sheriff eight years ago, said most “rural and small-town” departments call their area mental health center for assistance when they’re summoned to deal with someone who’s thought to be mentally ill.

“If we’re dealing with someone who’s mentally ill, we call Area Mental Health (Center in Garden City) and they’ll send somebody over to evaluate them,” he said. “We do that before we go into arrest mode. That’s how most departments handle it. But that assumes we could get the individual calmed down and the situation wasn’t lethal.”

Kramer said his deputies are equipped with Tasers; their supervisors have non-lethal shotguns that fire pellet-filled bean bags, which can be more lethal than Tasers.

“In the last 10 years, we’ve probably had to ‘Tase’ two people,” he said. “There have been some others, but we’ve always managed to talk them down. It took hours and hours to do it, but we’ve always managed to talk them down.”

Smith said Ottawa police fired “three, maybe four” bean bags at Jennings.

Mental health training for law enforcement officers is optional. It’s not subject to state or federal mandates.

“It’s a local thing,” said Cagan of NAMI-Kansas. “There are some state and federal grants out there, but fundamentally it has to be a local initiative. That’s OK because the basic concept behind CIT is for this to be a community-level partnership and for there be an ongoing dialog between law enforcement, mental health providers and consumers.”

Cagan said Ford, Johnson, Leavenworth, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Wyandotte counties use crisis intervention teams. Lyon and Reno counties are working to restart their teams, he said, and Douglas County will begin CIT training early next year.

Police and sheriff’s departments also have the option of sending officers to a weeklong course at the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center near Hutchinson. The voluntary classes, which are similar to CIT, are offered twice a year for up to 35 students.

“It’s advanced and specialized training given to specific officers to respond to mental health emergencies,” said Mark Damitio, deputy assistant director at the training center in Hutchinson. “It’s provided in much the same fashion or belief that not every cop out there has to be a canine officer, not every cop has to be a narcotics detective, and not every cop has to have an advanced level of CIT training. But it sure is great when there is someone with that specialized talent who can respond” to a crisis call.
In 2012, Kansas legislators passed a resolution that declared CIT to be “best practice” in Kansas. Lawmakers also agreed to set aside the $50,000 that’s now used to underwrite the two classes at the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center.

The $50,000 is used to cover the room-and-board and training-material costs for 60 to 70 officers over a two-week period. The officers’ employers are expected to pay costs of covering their work shifts while they are in Hutchinson.

More funding in the works

In May, Gov. Sam Brownback announced that his administration planned to spend an additional $9.5 million on mental health services in the fiscal year that began July 1.

The plan, he said, included $500,000 for a not-yet-defined grant program aimed at diverting the mentally ill from the state’s jails and prisons.

“We’ll have an announcement on this soon,” Eileen Hawley, Brownback’s communications director, wrote in an email to KHI News Service.

Recommendations on how to spend the $500,000 are being developed by the governor’s Law Enforcement Behavioral Health Advisory Council, a group that includes Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, Kansas Department of Corrections Secretary Ray Roberts, Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter and Bill Cochran, a captain with the Topeka Police Department.

“We’ve had two telephone conferences and we’re getting ready to have a third,” Cochran said. “We’re still looking for the best, most efficient way – within the dollars that are available – to bring law enforcement and correction officers throughout the state more up to speed when it comes to dealing with people in mental health crises.”

Cochran said he’s expressed support for expanding both CIT and a program called Mental Health First Aid, which includes classes designed to help the public understand mental illness and respond to crises.

“CIT is a 40-hour curriculum; Mental Health First Aid is eight hours,” he said. “Your smaller departments can’t afford to give up an officer for 40 hours. Eight hours might be more affordable.”

But the cost of the programs, Cochran said, isn’t the only factor driving training decisions.

“In law enforcement, we spend a lot of money doing a lot of other things,” he said. “So a lot of this comes down to choosing how these dollars are going to be spent. I tell people: We’ve become very proficient in training our people on firearms; we’ve spent a lot of time and money doing it. That’s a good thing, but the likelihood of an officer using that firearm on a daily basis is pretty minimal.

“But that officer is far more likely to come across someone who’s suffering from a mental illness or who’s in a mental health crisis,” Cochran said. “Just about every call that officer is going to respond to is going to involve someone in one mental health crisis or another.”

In June and July, he said, Topeka police responded to 90 calls, involving someone threatening suicide. Officers were on the scene for one to two hours for most of those calls.

Sam Cochran, no relation to Bill, had a hand in launching the nation’s first CIT program in 1988 as a Memphis police officer.

“It’s not a perfect program by any means,” said Sam Cochran, who is now retired. “And I don’t want anyone to think that just because they have CIT they’ll never have to worry about something like this (Ottawa shooting) happening again. It’s not a panacea, but it’ll give responding officers some alternatives that they may not have now and, hopefully, it’ll slow things down and open up communication.”

On the national level, Kansas’ CIT programs often are cited for their progressiveness, Sam Cochran said.

“The expertise and the commitment for making this happen are there,” he said. “My advice for the people of Kansas is to go to their county commissions and city councils and say, ‘We want to see specific money put in the law enforcement budget to cover the overtime costs of sending two or three officers to CIT.”

Jennings’ aunt said she intends to heed Sam Cochran’s advice. “That’s what I want to see come out of this,” Brandy Smith said. “That’s what I want to see happen.”