Increasing cloudiness is expected by Wednesday with additional periods of overcast, fog and sprinkles possible through the later half of the week. A rain and snow event is possible around Sunday or Monday, however certainty is quite low this far out in time.
Today Patchy fog before 9am. Otherwise, mostly sunny, with a high near 42. Northeast wind 5 to 8 mph becoming southeast in the afternoon. Tonight Areas of fog after 3am. Otherwise, mostly cloudy, with a low around 29. South southeast wind 7 to 11 mph. Wednesday Patchy fog before 9am. Otherwise, partly sunny, with a high near 43. South southeast wind 5 to 9 mph. Wednesday Night Areas of fog after 3am. Otherwise, increasing clouds, with a low around 38. Southeast wind 3 to 6 mph. Thursday Areas of fog before 9am. Otherwise, partly sunny, with a high near 56. South wind 5 to 8 mph. Thursday Night Mostly cloudy, with a low around 40. Friday Partly sunny, with a high near 61. Friday Night Partly cloudy, with a low around 45. Saturday Mostly sunny, with a high near 63.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas school district superintendent says two employees have been placed on administrative leave in connection with an ongoing FBI investigation.
Maize Superintendent Doug Powers tells KWCH-TV the probe doesn’t involve a district student but didn’t say what federal authorities are investigating. School board members didn’t publicly address the Nov. 18 search at their Monday meeting but Powers gave his first update to the press.
Powers says he hasn’t received an update from the FBI since the search at the Maize Educational Support Center.
The district reset student and parent passwords to its online gradebook and student data system after the search. Powers says no information was compromised and the move was precautionary.
The employees’ names and positions haven’t been released.
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 (https://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.
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — Police have identified a woman fatally shot in a Lowe’s Home Improvement store parking lot in Kansas City, Kansas.
Kansas City, Kansas, police say a 28-year-old man has turned himself in to police in connection to the Sunday shooting death of 29-year-old Janet Billings of Bonner Springs. Police describe the man as a person of interest but haven’t released his identity.
They say the man and Billings knew each other but didn’t say how.
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The administration of Wichita’s school district will be moving to another building in 2016.
The Wichita school board voted Monday to sell the district’s downtown administration building to a developer for $1.2 million. The building will be renovated into loft apartments.
The district will lease the building for $4,700 a month until it can move into the current Southeast High School after a new Southeast High opens in the fall of 2016.
The district’s administrative center has been housed at the nine-story Alvin E. Morris Administrative Centerto since 1994.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Topeka’s new police chief says his department is providing far more officers to the local school district than its contract requires and thus will be reassigning some of them.
Soon after James Brown became chief in October he informed the Topeka School District of his intentions. Each year the school district signs a contract with the police department to boost its own 12-person police force.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports last year’s contract called for the department to provide four officers to the school district for a fee of $366,000, but instead has been providing 11.
Brown has pulled two officers from the school district and says he plans to remove more.
Superintendent Julie Ford said her district can’t pay $366,000 a year for fewer services than it previously received.
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The city of Topeka is paying a $16,000 demolition fee originally billed to a family grieving the death of an 18-year-old woman in a house fire last month.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that City Manager Jim Colson said Monday that he apologized to the family of Morgan Duncan, who died in a Nov. 20 fire.
The bill was for the weeklong demolition of the home in which Duncan lived. Her mother received the bill last week, just days before a memorial service.
Colson said he ordered an investigation, and the city concluded that the demolition was necessary to put out the fire and keep fire and emergency personnel safe.
Colson said that made the city responsible for the cost of hiring a private company to do the work.
The Fort Hays State Tigers raced out to a 20-4 lead over the first 10 minutes and cruise to a 94-50 win over Northwestern Oklahoma State Monday night at Gross Coliseum. The Tigers had runs of 9-0, 10-0 and 14-0 in the first half, building a 31-point halftime lead. The Rangers hit just 1 of their first 14 shots and hit only six shots in the first half scoring just 17 points.
Dom Samac led five Tigers in double-figures with a career-high 19 points and 13 rebounds. Royce Williams went 5-for-5 from beyond the arc and scores 17. Jake Stoppel and Achoki Moikobu add 13 and Jeremy Wilson 10.
Mark Johnson Postgame Interview
Dom Samac Postgame Interview
FHSU shoots a season-high 65-percent from the floor including 11-of-17 from beyond the arc and dishes out 27 assists on their 33 made shots. Craig Nicholson recorded nine assists and had five steals.
The Rangers cut a 31-point halftime deficit to 24 midway through the second half, but the Tigers respond with a 25-4 run to build a 45 point lead with just under five minutes to play.
Game Highlights
The win improves FHSU to 6-3 while the Rangers fall to 2-6 with three of those losses coming to MIAA teams (FHSU, Central Oklahoma and Emporia State).
The Tigers return to action December 16, closing out non-conference play against Bethany College.
WICHITA – Two people were injured in an accident just before 6 p.m. on Monday in Sedgwick County.
The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2005 Honda Odyssey driven by Tan Minh Tang, 45, Wichita, and a 2005 Ford Focus driven by Janet L. Flamik, 59, Rush Center, were southbound on Interstate 135 at mile post 4 in Wichita. The vehicles came to a stop in heavy traffic
A 2004 Ford Escape driven by Sabrina Marie Flangan, 18, Wichita, failed to stop, hitting the Focus and causing it to hit the Honda.
Tang and a passenger in the Focus, Artis M. Speed, 65, Wichita, were transported to local hospital. Flamik and Flangan were not injured.
The KHP reported all were properly restrained at the time of the accident.
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.
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.
