(AP) A group has delivered more signatures on a petition aimed at forcing a public vote on a proposal to rebuild Kansas City International Airport.
Citizens for Responsible Government/Friends of KCI delivered nearly 1,600 more petition signatures to City Hall on Monday.
The signatures delivered Monday now have to be checked by the election board.
Proponents of the proposal to demolish two of KCI’s three terminals and rebuild the airport as a single-terminal facility say the proposed airport would offer better security, more parking and more retail options.
Opponents contend that the current airport suffices, and they like its ease and convenience. They also say while the current airport may need significant upgrades, demolishing and rebuilding is unnecessary and would also be costly.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — The Nebraska nuclear plant that sat idle for nearly three years while regulators evaluated problems should reach full power sometime on Christmas Day.
The Omaha Public Power District received permission on Dec. 17 from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restart Fort Calhoun.
OPPD spokesman Jeff Hanson says the restart process that began last week has gone smoothly.
Fort Calhoun initially shut down for routine maintenance in April 2011, but significant flooding that summer, a small fire and a series of safety violations forced it to remain closed for an extended period.
The utility has spent more than $180 million as it addressed more than 450 concerns at the plant, and federal inspectors double-checked the work.
The repair bill may grow because that cost estimate just runs through November.
Some people forget about the true meaning of Christmas – celebrating the birth of Christ, love, friendship and spending time with the family. As a youngster I have fond memories of Mom inside fixing turkey and dressing while my brothers and I would be playing outside throwing snowballs, playing “fox and geese” and just being kids.
One thing I’ll never forget about this period of my life are some of my dad and his friend’s favorite sayings. It seems like we always visited more during the holiday season and as children we had the opportunity to hear some of these words of wisdom more often during this time of year.
These sayings came from neighbors, brothers and cousins – folks he’d lived with for years, some as many as 70 years. A few were rare buddies, with special nicknames like, Cactus, Drawers, Baldy, Short Legs, Fuzzy – you get the picture.
Here are just a few – the gems – the ones I’ll remember always:
* Your friends are the measure of your real worth.
* The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.
* Why do you think the good Lord gave you two ears and one mouth? So you could listen twice as much as you talk.
* Wait until you get a little older, then you’ll understand.
* If you’re going to train your dog, you have to be smarter than the dog.
* Never be too quick to criticize yourself. It ain’t fair to your friends and relatives who are itchin’ to do it for you.
* If all of your friends climbed up the elevator and jumped off, would you have to too?
* If you haven’t been bucked off a horse, then you’ve never ridden one.
* You can’t listen too much when a friend needs someone to talk to.
* Some things aren’t funny even to your best friend.
* If we have to love our enemies, we have to treat our friends even better.
* A friend is someone who dislikes the same people you do.
* The only way to have a friend is to be one.
* The best three friends a man can have are his wife, an old dog and ready money.
* A real pal will at least pretend to believe your lies.
* At the end of your life if you have two or three true friends, you’ve lived a good life.
* A true friend is someone who knows that when you’ve made a fool of yourself it generally isn’t permanent.
*When a friend drops by about dinnertime and you ask, “What brings you by here at this time?” You still have to ask him to stay for a bite to eat.
* Good friends are hard to find and harder to lose.
Most of us have a few good friends. Be thankful for them. Remember them during this magical time of year. If you can’t stop by to see them, call them on the phone or drop them an e-mail message.
Remember during this holiday season that joy springs from the heart of those dedicated to caring and helping others. The Christmas spirit dwells inside each of us.
Merry Christmas.
John Schlageck is a leading commentator on agriculture and rural Kansas. Born and raised on a diversified farm in northwestern Kansas, his writing reflects a lifetime of experience, knowledge and passion.
Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
(AP) — A NASA spacecraft has sent holiday greetings from the outer solar space.
The space agency on Monday released dazzling new images of the ringed planet Saturn and its moons. The Cassini spacecraft took the pictures earlier this year.
Saturn resembled an ornament in one image, with a jet stream swirling at its north pole along with a hurricane-like storm.
Cassini also peered through the hazy atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, revealing hydrocarbon lakes. The icy Saturn moon Enceladus appears as a white snowball.
Cassini, funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, was launched in 1997. The spacecraft reached Saturn in 2004 and has been studying the planet and its many moons.
(AP) Five children are in protective custody after a neighbor found one of them locked out of his Kansas City home in freezing weather.
The neighbor heard the 6-year-old boy crying around 9 p.m. Sunday, when the temperature was about 15 degrees.
Police were called, and the boy told officers he fell asleep inside the family’s car on the way home from dinner. He woke up alone in the car and couldn’t get inside the house.
A man and woman in the house told police they thought all the children were upstairs sleeping. The adults were being questioned Monday.
Police said the home lacked heat and hot water and had other problems. Along with the 6-year-old, three other boys and a girl were in protective custody.
(AP) A Missouri panel’s delay in approving millions of dollars in low-income housing tax credits has prompted bipartisan criticism.
The Missouri Housing Development Commission decided earlier this month to delay about $14 million annually in credits for developers to build apartments for low-income residents. The decision came shortly after Missouri lawmakers approved legislation authorizing up to $1.7 billion in tax incentives over two decades for Boeing Co. to build a plant in the St. Louis area.
The tax credits were linked informally to the Boeing incentives as part of negotiations between Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon and several Republican senators.
Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder and Democratic Sen. Jamilah Nasheed said Monday there is no reason for the incentives to be linked.
CHICAGO (AP) — Monday’s deadline for signing up for insurance under the new health care law has effectively been extended through Tuesday in case of heavy demand on the government website.
Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the federal agency overseeing the Obama administration’s health overhaul, says the grace period is being offered to accommodate people from different time zones and to deal with potential technical problems that could result from a last-minute rush of applicants.
Monday was the deadline for Americans who wanted coverage that started on Jan. 1.
The federal HealthCare.gov system serves 36 states. Some other states have also extended enrollment deadlines slightly.
Three people were injured in a Monday morning crash in Nodaway County. According to the Missouri Highway Patrol fifty-five year old Marylou Kenny of Skidmore was driving a 2003 Chrysler south on RT ZZ just after 8 a.m.
Kenny lost control of the car on the snow-covered road. The vehicle travelled off the west side of the road and struck an embankment.
Kenny and passengers Earl W. Sharp age 83 and Mary Sharp age 82 of Skidmore were transported to the Heartland Regional Medical Center. Earl was the only one not wearing a seat belt.
(AP) — Funeral services will be on Christmas Eve for a Missouri native killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.
Services for 35-year-old Joseph B. Silverman are at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday at Berger Memorial Chapel in Olivette. Burial will be at Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in Chesterfield.
Silverman was a chief warrant officer for the Army and a graduate of Parkway Central High School. His family once lived in Chesterfield.
Silverman and five other soldiers died in the crash on Dec. 17 when a Black Hawk UH-60 helicopter went down during a mission in Zabul province.
Silverman was living in Scottscale, Ariz., at the time of his death. He was among five of the soldiers who were based out of Fort Riley, Kan.
Paul Lambdin of Deloitte Consulting. Photo courtesy Nashville Health Care Council.
By Julie Appleby
Kaiser Health News
Jay Hancock
Kaiser Health News
Insurance companies selling through the health law’s troubled online marketplaces are scrambling to provide coverage by Jan. 1 even as swarms of customers are still enrolling and making their first payments.
Federal officials and state regulators have repeatedly altered rules to allow the Affordable Care Act’s computers to enroll as many as possible before 2014 begins. The combination of problem software, changing deadlines and shifting regulations over the last two months is unprecedented, insurers say.
“Going into this, knowing things weren’t going to go swimmingly, we did a lot of scenario planning so the health plans could build out contingency plans,” said Paul Lambdin of Deloitte Consulting, which advises insurers. “And thank goodness we did. But no one thought up the scenario we’re living in.”
Medical plans, with potentially billions in revenue at stake in the health law’s expansion of private coverage, have hired extra workers to run phone banks and tangle with paper applications that were supposed to be processed online.
They’ve assigned staff to pore through electronic enrollments that might be inaccurate or incomplete, or to remind customers to pay. They’re guiding applicants who were expected to sign up on the federal healthcare.gov site or portals run by the states.
“When you look at the problems associated with healthcare.gov and how long it took to be fixed, it seems unfair to ask insurance companies to have their systems incorporate these changes within a few weeks,” said Stephen Zaharuk, an insurance industry analyst for Moody’s Investors Service, which rates bonds.
Implementing the health law involved countless deadlines, but one that can’t budge is coverage for Jan. 1.
On Thursday the administration disclosed another change, exempting those whose policies have been cancelled from next year’s coverage requirements and allowing them to buy high-deductible “catastrophic” plans. Fewer than 500,000 people face losing insurance because of cancellation, administration officials told reporters.
Although marketplace enrollment for 2014 doesn’t end until March 31, many consumers are counting on insurance in January to replace expiring 2013 plans. Others without coverage, many with existing illness, have been promised for years that Jan. 1 is when they can have affordable, subsidized, comprehensive coverage for the first time.
“I can tell you they’re going to have people working through New Year’s Eve,” Lambdin said of the insurers. “If someone wants to see how hard the health plans are working, they can join them at their party.”
The Congressional Budget Office projected that 7 million would buy policies in 2014 issued by private insurers through the subsidized marketplaces, or exchanges. (That’s in addition to millions more low-income consumers expected to gain new Medicaid coverage in states that chose to expand it.)
But thanks largely to computer problems that surfaced after the exchanges opened in October, fewer than half a million had signed up through November.
The Phones Are Ringing
Since then insurers and marketplace administrators have reported enrollment surges and substantially improved software.
“We have definitely staffed up,” said Jon Urbanek, a senior vice president at Florida Blue, the Blue Cross affiliate in that state. “We’re looking at extremely high volumes coming in during the holidays.”
Call volume to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota “sort of ebbs and flows with the wait times on MNsure,” the Minnesota portal that sometimes keeps people waiting an hour or more, said Scott Keefer, the insurer’s vice president of policy.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan wrote a program to let applicants learn their eligibility for subsidies via phone text.
Health Care Service Corp. got a flood of calls related to President Barack Obama’s request last month that insurers allow customers to renew 2013 plans that don’t include required benefits under the Affordable Care Act, said Jeff Tikkanen, the company’s president of retail markets. HCSC runs Blues plans in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Illinois and Montana.
That, too, required more staff, he said.
The original signup deadline for January coverage was Dec. 15. In November, the Obama administration extended it to Dec. 23. This month it ordered insurers to accept payment even later — up to Dec. 31. Then insurers agreed to take payment until Jan. 10.
Insurers have said little about the administration’s request that they provide Jan. 1 coverage for those who sign up and pay after that.
Taking Preventive Steps
In any case, nobody expects everything to be done on time.
The health maintenance organization Kaiser Permanente expects some new subscribers to walk into clinics without yet having received their membership cards.
“We already have established mechanisms in place for handling people who show up at the medical centers but are not in our systems as members,” said Kaiser spokesman Chris Stenrud. “We trust the member and provide any immediate care needs. If the person turns out not to be a member, we will bill them for those services.”
(Kaiser Health News is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)
Cigna, selling exchange plans in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, has set up 24-hour hotlines, and a team to deal with new members and “post-enrollment snafus,” said spokesman Joe Mondy. New subscribers should expect a welcome package, but “if they don’t get a binder within a week’s time, they need to call us and make sure everything is in place,” he said.
Blue Cross Minnesota assigned people to double check electronic applications from MNsure.
“Sometimes the addresses don’t match. The date of birth may not match,” Keefer said. “We’ve had cases showing the dependents are the parents, and the parents are actually the children. Weird stuff like that.”
Another concern is that insurers might not get any enrollment file, flawed or not, from the federal healthcare.gov site run by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Insurers have reported continuing failures in data handoffs.
“That’s the problem most of us are worried about — people who have selected a health plan and we haven’t heard from CMS on,” said HCSC’s Tikkanen. “If I don’t have a record of them I don’t know who they are.”
Florida Blue advises new customers to print a screen shot of the enrollment confirmation on healthcare.gov just in case related emails and data submissions don’t get sent.
“That gives them something to keep in hand,” Urbanek said.
(AP) A group has delivered more signatures on a petition aimed at forcing a public vote on a proposal to rebuild Kansas City International Airport.
