JENNIFER PELTZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — A law enforcement official and online marketplace StubHub say cyber thieves got into more than 1,000 customers’ accounts and fraudulently bought tickets for events.

The official told The Associated Press on Tuesday that arrests are expected in a case that sprawls across international borders. The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the case ahead of arrests being announced and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is expected to hold a news conference Wednesday with English and Canadian officials. A Vance spokeswoman has declined to comment.

San Francisco-based StubHub says the thieves got account-holders’ login and password information from data breaches at other websites or from malware on the customers’ computers. The company says it detected the unauthorized transactions last year and gave refunds.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP) — A woman who pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after a fatal car crash in which she was driving drunk has been sentenced to 120 days in jail.

Twenty-three-year-old Krystal Beth Marie Cook also was sentenced Tuesday to one year of probation for the late 2012 accident that killed 23-year-old Darrel Wilson of Fair Grove. Wilson died after his Jeep was hit by Cook’s car on U.S. 65 about a mile south of Fair Grove.

The Springfield News-Leader reports prosecutors had sought a seven-year sentence for Cook.
Cook told troopers she had been drinking in Lebanon before the accident. A probable cause statement said her blood alcohol level was 0.134 percent.

A wrongful death lawsuit filed by Wilson’s parents was settled this month, with Cook agreeing to pay $650,000.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Auditors say a lack of accountability by some Kansas agencies that handle sensitive information could make citizens’ personal information vulnerable.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports an audit released this week says some agencies aren’t complying with requirements to provide detailed information technology plans because they see them as time consuming and of little value. Auditors say they found little state oversight of the required reports.

The audit found that 17 of the 45 agencies that hold data considered “high risk” had not had an independent evaluation of their security in the last three years.

Some lawmakers on the Legislative Post Audit Committee have asked the state’s information technology agency to provide an estimate of how much it would cost to implement recommendations made by the auditors.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) issued the following statement today in response to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the case of Halbig v. Burwell, where the court found that President Barack Obama’s health care law authorizes subsidies only through state exchanges, not the federal exchange:

“The court is just upholding the plain text of the president’s health care law, which was terribly written and poorly implemented. President Obama continues to ignore his constitutional duty to uphold the law, and this is yet another reminder that Congress must hold him accountable.”

Blunt has repeatedly called for the U.S. Senate to pass the “ENFORCE the Law Act,” which would put a procedure in place to allow Congress to authorize a lawsuit against the executive branch for failure to faithfully execute the laws. Blunt has also called for the full repeal of ObamaCare, and offered a number of common-sense health care solutions to replace the president’s health care overhaul.

According to a report issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 85 percent of Missourians who purchased a plan through the federal exchange received financial assistance.

LANCASTER (AP) – A rural northern Missouri sheriff is resigning after being accused of taking inmates to bars and having them work at his home.

KTVO-TV reported Tuesday that Schuyler County Sheriff Josh Dole has submitted a resignation letter to Gov. Jay Nixon. The letter says he will step down July 31 and cites “the events of the past couple of weeks.”

Dole is charged with three counts of permitting escape and two counts of tampering with a witness. He is to be arraigned August 7.

Court documents show Dole took inmates to bars in Knox and Sullivan counties and released two inmates to work at his home. The witness-tampering charges stem from allegations he ordered personnel not to reveal information to investigators.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Washburn University has asked federal investigators for more time to respond to an investigation into how the school handled an alleged sexual assault.

University spokeswoman Amanda Hughes says Washburn’s attorney requested an extension of the July 31 deadline to submit its sexual assault policies and procedures to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.

KSNT-TV reports the school is asking for an additional four to six weeks because of the volume of documents being sought.

The victim of an alleged sexual assault filed a complaint against the school in April, and OCR opened its probe July 1. University police investigated the case and sent the findings to the Shawnee County District Attorney’s Office, while the student accused in the case was punished for violating student codes.

 

KANSAS CITY (AP) – The White House has announced President Barack Obama will be in Missouri next week to deliver a speech on the economy.

The Kansas City Star reports the president will arrive in Kansas City on July 29, spend the night and deliver his speech July 30.

Additional details of the visit, including the location of his speech, were not immediately available. It also isn’t known if the public will be able to attend.

The last time Obama visited the Kansas City area was September, when he spoke at the Ford plant in Claycomo.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Three more cases of measles have been confirmed in Sedgwick County, and officials say they expect more cases to emerge through August.

The Wichita Eagle reports the Kansas Department of Health and Environment announced the new cases on Tuesday, bringing the total in the county to 11.

Preston Goering, director of the county’s Preventative Health division, told county commissioners on Tuesday that the department’s staff has been going to several homes to take temperatures and check for symptoms when someone has been exposed.

KDHE spokeswoman Aimee Rosenow says the soonest the current outbreak can be considered over is the end of August.

Measles were thought to have been eliminated decades ago, but foreign travel and the refusal by some to vaccinate have caused the ailment to re-emerge.

 

By Alex Smith
KCUR

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — When Steve Jobs needed a liver transplant in 2009, the Apple CEO left California and went to Memphis, Tenn. While Jobs’ home state has some of the longest waiting lists in the country for donated livers, Tennessee has some of the shortest.

Many health advocates point to Jobs’ story as an example of the harsh disparities faced in different parts of the country by those who need new livers.

Plans are in the works to fix those disparities, but some Kansas City doctors worry about what a shake-up would mean for local hospitals and patients.

Waiting for a liver

After living for years with hepatitis C, 56-year-old retired pediatric nurse Marcy Quarles was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2013. In March, she was placed on the waiting list for a transplant.

“I sit here and I try to think positive about everything,” she said. “And I carry my phone with me constantly because I just know that I’m gonna get that call any minute, and that’s what I wait for.”

Quarles is staying in a bed at the University of Kansas Hospital, anticipating the day she gets a new liver.

“I just feel like I’m going to be happy and healthy,” she said, “and I’m going to be able to live out the rest of my life. I just imagine really good things to happen.”

But change is coming to the way donated livers are allocated in the United States, and Richard Gilroy, a hepatologist and medical director of transplantation at KU Hospital, said that’s not good news for those on waiting lists in Kansas and Missouri.

“Bottom line: people from our region will have longer wait times,” he said.

Generous donors

In a KU Hospital operating room, Dr. Timothy Schmitt removes a patient’s liver to make way for a donated one. Dr. Sean Kumar reaches in with a tiny vacuum to clear away blood.

While they work, their guitar rock mix, including tunes like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” wails in the background.

KU doctors performed 114 liver transplants last year — more than the number at many of the country’s biggest hospitals. The hospital has even become something of a destination for those seeking transplants. Schmitt estimates about 5 percent of his transplant patients come from outside the region.

KU credits Schmitt and his team with the program’s success, but a lot of credit also goes to the generosity of local organ donors, said Rob Linderer, CEO of the Midwest Transplant Network. The network coordinates organ donation for Kansas and the western half of Missouri.

“We see it with organ and tissue donation, that the Midwest — and particularly our area — people want to help other people, and they want to do it after their death,” Linderer said.

Long waiting lists

In addition to high donation rates, the area has a high rate of accidental deaths and a streamlined system of organ recovery. Those factors contribute to the entire area, not just KU, having some of the shortest waiting lists for livers in the country — particularly compared with California.

“We have a very, very high rate of liver disease due to the prevalence of hepatitis B and C in the Pacific Rim, and also there’s a higher predominance to liver failure among Hispanic populations (compared) to the general white population for more genetic reasons,” said Tom Mone, CEO of OneLegacy, which coordinates organ transplants for Los Angeles.

Los Angeles area residents also have longer average lifespans, which means when donors die, their organs may not be viable for transplant. In addition, the city has a younger population, which tends to donate at a lower rate. Those factors contribute to one of the country’s longest waiting lists.

Mone said Los Angeles patients wait 12 to 18 months longer than patients in the Midwest. There, patients typically must get a lot sicker than patients in Kansas City before they can get a transplant.

Last year, 129 people died in Los Angeles while awaiting liver transplants.

A more regional approach

For the past several years, the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, which coordinates transplants nationally, has been studying ways to address liver transplant disparities by changing the way donated livers are allocated and shifting some organs away from healthier patients and toward sicker ones.

“Patients can wait a little longer and they will be fine, and they’re going to have excellent outcomes, and so will the people that have been dying with a chance of getting one who may be in areas that have less robust access to these organs,” said David Mulligan, a professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine who chairs a UNOS committee on liver and intestinal transplants.

Today, most livers donated in Kansas and the western part of Missouri are used locally, with about 40 percent going to nearby areas of the Midwest and a few outside the region. UNOS is considering a change from this mostly local allocation strategy to a more regional, or even national, approach.

Under some of the plans being studied, organs donated in Kansas City would be sent much more often to places as far away as Phoenix, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City, depending on where they’re needed most.

Gilroy, the medical director of transplantation at KU, thinks that’s a mistake, in part because of what it might mean for programs like Medicaid.

“The cost to the state of Kansas and the state of Missouri will increase because they’re going to be managing more people sicker longer,” he said.

Transporting organs vs. patients

Mulligan said the biggest financial cost of the waiting lists comes from managing the patients who are the sickest. A UNOS model of the new allocation strategy shows that it would prevent patients in places like Los Angeles from reaching the most severe levels of illness.

“We can save over $150 million in health care costs by reducing these super-sick patients from having to go through that level of illness in hopes they can get a life-saving transplant,” he said.

The UNOS transplant committee’s model also shows that, although prioritizing sicker patients would result in many healthier patients getting sicker than they would now, it also could save nearly 600 lives nationally over five years.

But Schmitt, the KU transplant doctor who is also the hospital’s director of transplantation, isn’t convinced.

“We need to be careful because we might just create a system that just changes where you die versus how many transplants are done,” he said.

Schmitt thinks the key to addressing regional disparities is increasing organ donation rates and, in the case of severely sick patients, transporting them to places like Kansas City to take advantage of shorter wait times.

Like everyone involved in transplants, Mulligan agrees about the need for more donors but doesn’t think transporting patients is the solution.

Rather, he said, fixing the nation’s liver transplant disparities will require a more collaborative approach.

“I’m telling them, ‘Come on board, and let’s figure out a way. Let’s find a way to work together to save more lives.’ Because in the end, we’re all health care providers. We are all passionate about taking the best care we can of our patients,” Mulligan said.

KU officials estimate that adopting the new approach under consideration could reduce the number of liver transplants it performs by 40 percent over two years.

UNOS will host a public forum on liver allocation Sept. 16 in Chicago. A decision about the new strategy for transplantation is expected no earlier than the spring of 2015.