LANSING, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a man has died in a mobile home fire in eastern Kansas.

Chief Rick Huhn of Leavenworth County Fire District No. 1 said crews arrived on Thursday afternoon to find heavy smoke.

He says the man’s body was found inside the Lansing residence after firefighters were able to control the blaze. His identity wasn’t released.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

By ANDY MARSO

Retired grocery store executive David Dillon had a simple answer Wednesday to concerns that allowing stores like his to sell full-strength liquor would increase underage drinking.

“Hogwash,” Dillon said.

Dillon is the former chief executive of Kroger, owner of the Dillons franchise of Kansas grocery stores and one of the nation’s largest retailers.

He told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee that Kroger’s Kansas stores already safely sell other restricted products like pharmaceuticals, tobacco and low-strength beer.

“We have proven ourselves to be a responsible citizen of the state,” Dillon said, “and in all the other 25 states where Kroger does business and has these products in the store, we have a similarly strong track record.”

Dillon was among those who testified for House Bill 2200, legislation that would allow full-strength beer, wine and liquor sales in grocery and convenience stores starting in 2018.

Opponents are scheduled to testify Thursday and neutral testimony is set for Friday. Rep. Mark Hutton, a Republican from Wichita who chairs the committee, said he expects the committee to debate and possibly vote on the bill late next week.

Legislators have unsuccessfully introduced similar bills in each of the last few sessions. This year’s bill attempts to quell opposition from liquor store owners by capping the number of full-liquor Class B licenses statewide and allowing liquor store owners to sell their licenses to grocers or convenience stores within the same county. Grocery and convenience stores would be able to access an uncapped number of Class A licenses limited to full-strength beer sales.

A study released last year by the Kansas Health Institute, found that expanding liquor licenses in the state has the potential to increase underage drinking https://www.khi.org/news/article/potential-health-effects-expanding-liquor-licenses, unless the expansion is accompanied by other regulatory controls. Other public health impacts could include an increase in traffic fatalities and sexually transmitted diseases, according to the study.

Much of the proponent testimony Wednesday centered on consumer convenience and the ideals of free market competition.

But consumers who had lived in other states that allow liquor sales in grocery stores testified that they saw no negative effects.

Aaron Rosenow, owner of Vern’s Retail Liquor and leader of a group of Kansas liquor store owners who oppose the bill, said after the hearing that he has seen evidence to the contrary.

Rosenow pointed to Washington state, which two years ago opened alcohol sales to private retailers, including supermarkets, after previously allowing them only at state-controlled liquor stores.

“Now they have the highest theft of alcohol they’ve ever seen,” Rosenow said. “It’s exponential numbers. Thirty, forty thousand dollars one guy got away with per month, stealing high-end booze and selling it at pure profit.”

The bill being considered in the Kansas House also would lower the age at which a store employee could sell alcohol from 21 to 18, but only if the employee is supervised by another employee who is 21 or older.

Rep. Rick Billinger, a Republican from Goodland, asked Dillon if that has caused problems in other states.

“You ever have any fines for these 18-year-olds selling alcohol to their friends who are 18?” Billinger said.

“We’ve had a few,” Dillon said.

Dillon said the company had one such instance last year in Kansas, where its stores can only sell beer up to 3.2 percent alcohol content. Dillon said corporate training has minimized such infractions.

“We’re actually very proud of our record, and we push ourselves hard,” Dillon said.

Tom Palace, who testified for the bill on behalf of convenience store owners, said those stores also already safely sell age-restricted products like lottery tickets and cigarettes.

“Obviously compliance is an important issue for us, and we take precautions,” Palace said.

Palace said technology allows convenience store owners to take “human error” out of the equation when it comes to checking consumers’ identification cards. Software now allows clerks to punch in a birthdate and immediately be told whether the consumer is of age.

Rosenow said that system wouldn’t be sufficient to stop an 18-year-old convenience store clerk from selling a bottle of vodka to an underage friend for a party.

“If a 21-year-old is on the floor in the back room doing something and his friend comes up and he’s the only one at a gas station that sells hard liquor or hard beer, it’s not going to take that long to enter in a fake birthdate to skirt their system of controlling regulation of the age of who buys a product,” Rosenow said.

Editor’s note:  The Kansas Health Institute is the parent organization of the editorially independent KHI News Service.

Andy Marso is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Gay rights supporters are planning a weekend rally at the Kansas Statehouse to protest the end of anti-discrimination protections for gay, lesbian and transgendered workers in much of state government.

The event at noon Saturday is a response to Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s decision this week to narrow a policy that covers hiring and employment decisions in state agencies controlled directly by the governor.

Brownback rescinded an executive order issued in August 2007 by then-Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

A state law barring discrimination in housing and private employment doesn’t cover such bias, and Brownback said Sebelius acted unilaterally in her order. Brownback said the Legislature should decide whether to extend such protections to gays and lesbians in state government.

LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Department officials say hormone treatment for gender reassignment has been approved for Chelsea Manning, the former intelligence analyst convicted of espionage for sending classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.

The officials say the hormone therapy was approved February 5 by the commandant of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Manning is serving a 35-year sentence.

The treatment would enable the Army private formerly known as Bradley Manning to make the transition to a woman.

A lawsuit filed in September claimed Manning was at a high risk of suicide unless she received more focused treatment for the sense of being a woman in a man’s body, or vice versa.

The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

By ALEX SMITH
If you’re in the market for fluorescent light bulbs, you might talk to Chris Smiley. In the past few weeks, she’s been trying to sell off what’s left of Sac-Osage Hospital.

“Casework, lighting, plumping, sinks, toilets. Anything you want,” Smiley says.

That’s not in her job description. She’s actually the CEO of Sac-Osage, a hospital in Osceola, Mo., that closed in September.

“I have become an auctioneer,” Smiley says. “And I’ve learned more about asbestos and construction demolition than I ever wanted to know.”
The small, 45-year-old hospital shut down, Smiley explains, because of diminishing payments from Medicare as well as a heavy load of uninsured patients.

It’s a scenario more and more hospitals are facing – one that’s been especially hard on rural hospitals in states that have not expanded Medicaid.

Such hospitals are often the biggest employers in rural counties. But unless Medicaid eligibility is expanded to include more low-income people, as the Affordable Care Act envisions, officials at those hospitals say they may be forced to cut jobs – or even, like Sac-Osage, to close down.

The payment reductions that hospitals face came about in large part because of an agreement they made when the Affordable Care Act was crafted.

“It was a quid-pro-quo deal that the hospitals made,” says Timothy McBride, a health economist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Hospitals expected to see millions of newly insured customers thanks to federal subsidies enabling people to buy health insurance and the expansion of state Medicaid programs. In exchange, they agreed to accept reduced Medicare payments and a huge cut in Disproportionate Share Hospital, or DSH, funding, which the federal government pays to offset the costs of uncompensated care.

Federal law requires hospitals to treat all patients in emergency situations, regardless of ability to pay, and many hospitals provide a full range of services without reimbursement.

Quid pro quo

McBride says the American Hospital Association offered to forego more than $100 billion in federal payments. The thinking was that hospitals would be able to make up for the losses through the influx of newly insured patients.

But in 2012, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional, it also decided that individual states could not be required to expand their Medicaid programs. Many states, including Missouri and Kansas, chose not to do so.

That left many rural hospitals in an untenable situation.

“It’s been kind of a double-whammy, if you will. We’ve taken a cut in reimbursement and not received any additional patients with any type of coverage,” says Ronald Ott, CEO of Fitzgibbon Hospital in Marshall, Mo.

Last year, two of Missouri’s 74 rural hospitals (including psychiatric, rehabilitation and Veterans hospitals) shut down. Statewide, about 1,800 hospital employees lost their jobs, according to the Missouri Hospital Association.

All told, Missouri hospitals say they expect to lose nearly $3.5 billion by the end of 2019 because of Affordable Care Act cuts. Similarly, hospitals in neighboring Kansas and Nebraska anticipate major reductions of well over $1 billion each over the coming decade.

To avoid economic ruin, Missouri hospital leaders say the state needs to expand Medicaid eligibility to include people with incomes below 139 percent of the federal poverty level, as provided by the Affordable Care Act. That would add about 300,000 people to the Medicaid rolls in the state, an increase of nearly 40 percent.
Without expansion, the Missouri Hospital Association says, the state could lose 5,000 jobs in health care and other fields.

Holding fast

Ott shutters to think about what closing Fitzgibbon Hospital would mean for Marshall. The hospital employs 600 people in the largely rural community.

“It would be disaster,” he says. “I just can’t imagine how difficult it would be for the community.”

But conservatives in Missouri’s largely pro-business legislature remain unmoved.

“Now the hospitals have brought some of this on themselves,” says Republican Sen. Ed Emery from Lamar, Mo., “A lot of it was what we call in the rural areas ‘betting on the come’: If you’ll do this, then we’ll promise you this, and those promises were not fulfillable.”

Emery is among the majority of Missouri state senators who have held fast against Medicaid expansion because they say it will cost the state too much money and create too much reliance on government.

“Now they want my constituents and taxpayers to bail them out, and I just don’t think that’s the right thing to do,” he says.

The federal government has agreed to pay the entire cost of Medicaid expansion for states through 2016, phasing down eventually to 90 percent.

Studies conducted by the University of Missouri and the Missouri Budget Project show that once the federal funding level drops, expansion would call for hundreds of millions of dollars in state spending. But those costs would be offset or even exceeded by the economic boost provided by the federal funds.

The 2012 University of Missouri study forecast that the state would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue and create tens of thousands of jobs in the next few years if it approved expansion.

The principal author of that study, MU professor and health economist Lanis Hicks, says that since the state has missed the first two years of federal expansion funding, the potential tax revenue is somewhat lower now than what her study initially predicted – though she maintains expansion at this point would still save the state money and produce jobs.

Republican Sen. David Pearce doesn’t buy it.

“The thought that, because you have federal dollars that that creates jobs – at the very end of the day we’re all paying for that,” Pearce says. “And so if it’s something you can’t afford, then it’s something you can’t afford.”

Pearce represents the state’s 21st district, where Fitzgibbon Hospital is located. He professes to be concerned about jobs there but insists the overall nature of health care is changing due to changing demographics and consolidation.

“As we all know, healthcare is extremely expensive, and so to be able to have a hospital in each county probably is not going to be a model we can sustain in the future,” Pearce says.

The end

It’s a future that has already come to Osceola.

In a town of around 900 people, Sac-Osage Hospital employed more than 100. Now, a few months after the hospital closed its doors, that workforce has dwindled to five.

The remaining employees include Carolyn Bruce and Connie Chapman, who worked at the hospital for a combined 75 years. In recent weeks, they’ve been digitally scanning the hospital’s decades of paper records and preparing the building for demolition on May 1.

Since the hospital closed, a few clinics have helped fill the health care gap, and most of the employees have been able to find work elsewhere. But the town is now without an emergency room or inpatient services. There’s not another full-service hospital for 30 miles in any direction.

And of course the town’s largest single employer is no more.

CEO Chris Smiley keeps a stiff upper lip as she talks about the end of the hospital. But after her remaining employees leave for the day, she admits the closure has been difficult.

“This is my last job, so I see it as a failure,” Smiley says. “I don’t know that I could’ve done anything different. I don’t think I could have saved the hospital. I hope that I have done everything that I could do to minimize the negative impact on my people and on the community.”

 

Alex Smith is a reporter for Heartland Health Monitor, a news collaboration focusing on health issues and their impact in Missouri and Kansas.

Great Bend Post

GREAT BEND-Jeffrey Wade Chapman was found guilty of first-degree murder for killing Damon Galyardt in November, 2011. After two days of deliberations, the jury presented their verdict late Thursday afternoon at the Barton County Courthouse.

Chapman fatally shot Galyardt on November 11, 2011 and left his body just southwest of Great Bend.

There is no scheduled date for Chapman’s sentencing although it will likely happen within 60 days.

 

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is giving more options to decide what happens to users’ accounts after they die.

The world’s biggest online social network said Thursday it will now let users pick someone who can manage their account after they pass away. Previously, the accounts were “memorialized” after death, or locked so that no one could log in.

Beginning in the U.S., Facebook says users can choose a “legacy contact” to post on their page after they die, respond to new friend requests and update their profile picture and cover photo. Users can also have their accounts deleted instead.

Facebook also ensures that the account of a user who died doesn’t show up as a “suggested friend” or in other ways that could upset the person’s loved ones.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The leader of a Kansas commune that lived off the life insurance payouts of its dead members has taken the stand to deny he killed any of them.

Fifty-five year old Daniel Perez said Thursday that he has never claimed to be a seer with magical powers as numerous others have testified. He is charged with first-degree premeditated murder in the 2003 drowning death of 26-year-old Patricia Hughes at the group’s compound near Wichita.

He also denied the accusations of rape, sodomy, criminal threat, lying on life insurance applications and credit applications and sexual exploitation of a child for which he is charged.

Perez contended any sex was consensual, and tried to shift the blame to others.

Both sides rested their cases and closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday.

—————-

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The leader of a Kansas commune that lived off the life insurance payouts of its dead members has taken the stand in his own defense.

Fifty-five year old Daniel Perez testified Thursday about his time in Texas where he met the woman he is now accused of killing. He is charged with first-degree premeditated murder in the 2003 drowning death of 26-year-old Patricia Hughes at the group’s compound near Wichita.

Other charges include rape, sodomy, criminal threat, lying on life insurance applications and credit applications and sexual exploitation of a child.

Prosecutors say the group’s wanderings across several states over a 15-year was marked by sexual violence and the deaths of six people. His defense attorney says Perez didn’t kill Hughes, and called the other deaths coincidental.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas birthing center licensed to deliver babies for healthy women with uncomplicated pregnancies has been temporarily shut down and declared a public health risk by the state health department.

The Birth and Women’s Center in Topeka was placed under emergency suspension Feb. 4 after an investigation determined the center had violated several stipulations of its licensing by failing to keep proper records or complying with quality assurance requirements.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment says it received complaints of an unusually high incidence of medical problems in women and their children who had been delivered there.

A woman who answered the phone at the center referred questions to Dr. Josie Norris, the practitioner who oversees the birth center.

Norris didn’t immediately return a phone call.

By Amelia Arvesen
KU Statehouse Wire Service

TOPEKA — It is a constitutional right for people to carry a concealed handgun without a permit, urged gun right activists Thursday when they testified in a hearing on Senate Bill 45 before legislators.

Sen. Majority Leader Terry Bruce (R-Hutchinson) the chief sponsor among 25 co-sponsors of 40 Senators, said the bill upholds the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

“There truly is not a reason why you need the government’s permission to protect you or defend your family,” Bruce said.

Legislators decided last year to allow citizens to carry an open or unconcealed firearm without a permit. Bruce said passing the bill would give Kansans the freedom to carry a handgun under their clothing or in their purse if they choose.

Sen. Tom Holland (D-Baldwin City) a gun rights supporter, and David Nichols, a member of the NRA, expressed concerns with the removal of formal training administered through the current conceal-and-carry permit system.

“I don’t relish the idea of someone carrying a concealed handgun for self defense, that has as much potential of inflicting deadly force on an innocent bystander as the assailant does,” Nichols said.

John Commerford, a state liaison with the National Rifle Association, said interest in education would increase, and access to training programs in Kansas wouldn’t change.

“We try to do our best to get the word out and make access as easy as possible for people so they can acquire training if they feel they need it,” Commerford said.

Since 2007, Kansas has issued permits for concealed carry. Permits cost $132.50 and a renewal application is $25.There are approximately 75,1000 permit holders in Kansas, said Joe Neville, political director for the National Association for Gun Rights.

Bill supporters also addressed concerns of increased criminal activity. Patricia Stoneking, president of the Kansas State Rifle Association, said the government should trust citizens unless they’ve provided a reason not to be trusted.

“Every law abiding citizen has a right and there’s no prohibitive law of any kind that you can ever pass that is going to prevent a criminal from doing something criminal,” Stoneking said.

Open carry and concealed carry is legal in Arizona, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming.

Members of the Senate’s Federal and State Affairs Committee will deliberate the bill before it moves to the Senate floor.

Amelia Arvesen is a University of Kansas senior from San Ramon, Calif., majoring in journalism.