MITCHELL COUNTY – Officials are investigating a fatal harvest accident in north central Kansas.

At 11:49 a.m. on Tuesday, first responders were called to a report of a man involved in a wheat harvest accident near the Northwest corner of P Road and Kansas 14 south of Beloit, according to the Mitchell County Sheriff’s Office.

Michael Alan Anderson, 43, Beloit, was pronounced dead at the scene and transported to McDonald Roberts Funeral Home.

No additional details were available on Wednesday.

PRATT COUNTY – A Kansas woman was injured in an accident just before 8a.m. on Wednesday in Pratt County.

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2010 Ford Taurus driven by Marian R. Bush, 91, Isabel, was northbound on SE 100th Avenue in the unincorporated community of Cairo.

The driver failed to yield at the top sign at U.S. 54.

A 2014 Dodge Ram driven by Bobby J. Cox, 32, Pratt, that was eastbound on U.S. 54 collided with the Ford.

Bush was transported to the hospital in Pratt.

Cox was not injured.

Both drivers were properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the KHP.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Former Dallas Cowboys running back Joseph Randle has been charged with threatening a deputy while jailed on other charges in Kansas.

The Wichita Eagle reports that Randle is charged in Sedgwick County with one count of criminal threat. He said he plans to hire a lawyer to represent him during a first appearance Tuesday via a video link from the jail.

Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Lin Dehning said in an email that Randle is accused of threatening a deputy who was “enforcing the rules” last month at the jail. No other details were immediately provided.

Randle has had a string of run-ins with the law. He’s also been charged in Kansas with a casino disturbance and with backing his car into three people. The Cowboys released Randle last year.

By ANDY MARSO

News of a mistake that dropped several thousand Kansans from state Medicaid backlog reports has advocates and Democratic lawmakers questioning the state’s oversight of the contractor blamed for the error.

Susan Mosier, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, sent a letter to federal officials June 10 to let them know that the reports they had been receiving since February — which showed the state’s backlog of Medicaid applications steadily declining — were inaccurate.

Download the letter to CMS officials from KDHE Secretary Mosier

The state had reported that the backlog of new applications awaiting processing as of May 8 was 3,480 and about 2,000 of those had been pending more than 45 days. After the reporting error was corrected, the state reported that as of May 22, the total backlog of new applications was 15,393 and nearly 11,000 of them had been waiting more than 45 days — the limit set by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Mosier placed responsibility for the error on a state contractor not named in the letter.

Angela de Rocha, a spokeswoman for state agencies, said Monday that the contractor in question is Accenture, the multinational firm that Kansas paid to build a new software platform for determining Medicaid eligibility called the Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System, or KEES. But she said the state is accountable for oversight.

“It’s ultimately our responsibility to get people’s applications determined, to get their eligibility determined,” de Rocha said. “But this is a setback.”

De Rocha said the state plans to withhold $750,000 from Accenture’s contract, which was extended through 2021 last year and is worth more than $250 million altogether.

Accenture spokeswoman Deirdre Blackwood said via email that the company did not make an error and was giving KDHE the information it requested.

“KDHE then refined how it wanted the numbers compiled and we worked with the state to revise the reports,” Blackwood said.

Blackwood said the changes in reporting didn’t affect the state’s ability to pare down the backlog.

Legislators voted in April to audit the Medicaid backlog, which began to develop last year after KEES went live. A previous audit, ordered after more than a year of KEES delays, revealed that Accenture had promised more than it could deliver when it signed the initial contract with the state.

Medicaid, which in Kansas is a privatized program called KanCare, is funded through a combination of state and federal dollars. Most of the funding for KEES came from federal coffers.

Sean Gatewood, a former Democratic lawmaker who represents people on Medicaid through a group called the KanCare Advocates Network, said it’s time for executive branch officials and legislators to ask tough questions about Kansas’ ability to hold contractors accountable.

“The underlying thing is, the state’s not watching the problems,” he said.

Gatewood said he hoped CMS officials would force accountability. A CMS spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

Sen. Laura Kelly, the top Democrat on the Legislature’s KanCare oversight committee, likened the KEES failures to the rocky Division of Motor Vehicles software switch by another contractor, 3M Company.

She said she doubted the state had enough top information technology talent to make sure contractors live up to agreements.

“Whenever you do a massive database software switch, there are going to be issues,” Kelly said. “I think that’s why you have to have very technically skilled people overseeing the process to protect the state’ interests.”

Turnover at the top

Some of the job positions designated to provide KEES oversight recently have been vacant.

Glen Yancey, chief information officer for KDHE, remains in place after three years as executive director of KEES.

But the agency is without a KEES project manager following April Nicholson’s move to the Department of Commerce in May. And the director of Medicaid eligibility position was vacant for more than a month until Kim Burnam was hired to replace Darin Bodenhamer in early June.

State officials have not said whether Bodenhamer quit or was fired.

ServiceAccenture, the state contractor in charge of developing the Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System, or KEES, has a project office in downtown Topeka.

De Rocha said the error in the backlog reports occurred because Kansans who reapplied for Medicaid after being denied were not being counted.

She said eligibility workers noticed that reapplications were not showing up in the uncompleted section of KEES and flagged the problem.

“So the system itself actually helped us catch this reporting mistake,” de Rocha said.

The reporting error came to light as advocates who help Kansans apply for Medicaid said they were seeing an increase in applications denied incorrectly.

Accenture develops software for government agencies across the country but has a checkered history. Shortly after signing the KEES contract in 2011, the company paid about $64 million to settle a lawsuit alleging kickbacks and other misdeeds in numerous federal IT projects. It has faced scrutiny more recently for cost overruns and delays on projects in Texas and California.

Kelly said it’s probably not feasible to seek another IT company to troubleshoot KEES, given the investment Kansas has made in Accenture and the state’s ongoing budget problems.

“I think it’s difficult to cut the cord, particularly when we don’t have a replacement in mind and we don’t have any money to get something new,” she said.

Blackwood, who works in Accenture’s Arlington, Va., location, said that “Accenture is meeting its contractual commitments to KDHE” and referred further questions to de Rocha.

A receptionist at Accenture’s KEES project office in downtown Topeka said the only person authorized to talk about the project was managing director Raymond Han, who was on a conference call at the time.

A message left for Han was not returned Monday.

Photo by Andy Marso/KHI News ServiceA visitor sign-in list at Accenture’s Topeka office showed that Phyllis Gilmore, secretary of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, attended a meeting there Friday.

A visitor sign-in list at Accenture’s Topeka office showed that Phyllis Gilmore, secretary of the Kansas Department for Children and Families, attended a meeting there Friday.

DCF spokeswoman Theresa Freed said it was a routine weekly meeting to talk about KEES.

Consequences

DCF workers processed some Medicaid applications until January, when KDHE took over operations at a centralized KanCare Clearinghouse.

Some DCF workers returned to help about a month later after the backlog ballooned following the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment period. Mosier, in her June 10 letter to federal officials, said they will remain on that job in light of the corrected backlog numbers.

Mosier also said temporary KDHE staff hired through the end of June would be kept on past that date, overtime would be authorized for state and Accenture workers on the project, and resources would continue to be shifted to help trim the list.

De Rocha said the corrected backlog numbers were disappointingly high and frustrating for state officials as well as Medicaid applicants.

“All of that said, we should have this backlog problem solved by the end of the summer,” de Rocha said.

Meanwhile, the glut of unprocessed applications continues to affect thousands of low-income Kansans waiting on their Medicaid cards, most of whom are elderly, disabled, pregnant or children.

The wait for coverage also is affecting those who provide services to those groups. Nursing homes were among the first to raise alarms about long wait times.

Cindy Luxem, president and CEO of a senior services organization called the Kansas Health Care Association, said her group recently surveyed its members about their outstanding bills for residents whose Medicaid applications are pending.

More than 100 nursing homes and providers of home and community-based services responded. Five nursing homes reported having at least one resident whose application had been pending a year or more.

One nursing home company reported 84 residents with pending applications and more than $750,000 in outstanding Medicaid claims.

Luxem said news of the higher backlog numbers made sense to her, in light of the survey responses.

“It did not surprise me when the story came out,” she said. “Because I believe we probably had several hundred in that list.”

Andy Marso is a reporter for KHI News Service in Topeka, a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor team. You can reach him on Twitter @andymarso

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — The father of a Kansas boy who was self-conscious about scarring following brain cancer surgery has got a tattoo that resembles his son’s scar on the side of his head.

Josh Marshall tells ABC News that 8-year-old Gabriel was left with a large horseshoe scar above his right ear after undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor. Marshall says Gabriel said he “felt like a monster.”

Last August, Marshall got a tattoo to match, telling his son, “if people want to stare at you, then they can stare at both of us.”

A photo of the pair took first place in the St. Baldrick’s Foundation’s #BestBaldDad competition on Father’s Day.

Marshall says Gabriel is doing well. He says a small tumor remains but that it hasn’t grown.

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas man was sentenced to nearly 19 years in prison for causing a traffic accident that killed a part-time police officer.

Dana Patton, of Olathe, was sentenced Tuesday in the October 2015 crash that killed David Stubbs, a part-time officer in Louisburg.

The 25-year-old Patton had previously pleaded guilty to reckless second-degree murder.

Prosecutors say Patton was driving a stolen car when he ran a red light at an intersection in Overland Park and hit Stubbs’ vehicle.

The Kansas City Star reports that at the time of the wreck, Patton was free on bond in several other auto theft cases.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Prosecutors say a cattle buyer from Harper County has been indicted on federal wire fraud charges.

The U.S. attorney’s office said in a news release Tuesday that 62-year-old Randall D. Patterson of Anthony has been charged with 14 counts of wire fraud. He owned Anthony Livestock Co., and is a former president of the National Livestock Marketing Association.

Patterson did not immediately return a message seeking comment left at the cattle company in Anthony.

The indictment stems in part from an agreement Patterson had with JBS Five Rivers Cattle Feeding under which he would purchase cattle at sales barns in Kansas and Oklahoma.

Prosecutors allege Patterson caused employees at his Anthony company to fax invoices to Five Rivers falsely inflating the amount paid for cattle.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Officials say Kansas’s average net farm income has plummeted from nearly $129,000 in 2014 to about $4,500 last year.

According to annual Kansas Farm Management Association data, 2015 was the lowest average level of nominal net farm income since 1985.

The Manhattan Mercury reports that the average had been more than $120,000 for several years until 2015.

The Wichita Eagle reports that farmers generally saw extraordinary returns between 2010 and 2014 because of high crop and cattle prices, driven in part by drought. But those prices fell drastically over the last 12 to 18 months, and incomes reflect that.

The data presented in the 2015 analysis came from 1,159 association member farms and ranches.

GIRARD, Kan. (AP) — A Chanute man has been arraigned in the traffic death of the head of the Washburn University art department who was struck and killed while riding her bike.

The Topeka Capital-Journal  reports that not guilty pleas were entered Monday on behalf of 38-year-old Todd M. Kidwell in Crawford County District Court. Kidwell is charged with reckless second-degree murder and misdemeanor counts of reckless driving and improper passing of a bicyclist.

Sixty-year-old Glenda Taylor was participating in an amateur time trial when she was hit in June 2015.

The defense argued at the preliminary hearing that the crash happened while Kidwell was trying to avoid a head-on collision with another pickup. A pickup truck passenger testified previously that Kidwell wasn’t driving erratically before the crash.

 

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — A competency evaluation has been ordered for a 17-year-old Lawrence boy accused of killing his grandmother.

The Lawrence Journal World reports that court proceedings against the teen have been suspended pending the results.

The teen was 16 in December when police found his 67-year-old grandmother, Deborah Bretthauer, dead in the apartment they shared.

The teen is charged in juvenile court, but prosecutors have filed a motion to try the teen as an adult.

If the boy is convicted of the juvenile first-degree murder charge, he could face up to 60 months in prison, or to the age of 22. In adult court, he could face more than 40 years in prison.

JOAN LOWY, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration has cleared the way for routine commercial use of small drones. The decision comes after years of struggling to write rules that would both protect public safety and free the benefits of a new technology.

The Federal Aviation Administration has created a new category of rules for drones weighing less than 55 pounds. The long-anticipated rules would mean drone operators would be able to fly without special permission.

Currently, they have to apply for a waiver from rules that govern manned aircraft, a process that can be time-consuming and expensive.

 

 

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Supreme Court is giving Gov. Sam Brownback until July 11 to tell the court why it shouldn’t force him to fill a vacant district magistrate position.

The court on Tuesday ordered the governor to explain why he didn’t make the appointment in 90 days, as required by state law.

Three 26th District judges filed a petition with the court last week after Brownback announced he would wait until after the August primaries to consider filling the vacancy, which was created when Judge Tommy Webb of Haskell County announced his retirement in February.

The petition says Kansas law requires five magistrate judges to serve the six-county district.

Brownback spokeswoman Eileen Hawley says the governor has the discretion under the Kansas constitution to make the appointment when he sees fit.

GEARY COUNTY – Law enforcement authorities in Geary County are asking the public for help to solve a crime.

On April 2, 1989 skeletal remains were discovered in Geary County on a sandbar of the Smoky Hill River near Grandview Plaza just south of Interstate 70, according to Sheriff Tony Wolf.

Following the examination of the remains by a Forensic Anthropologist, it was determined that the remains belong to a white man who was between 36 and 49 years old at the time of death.

The deceased was approximately 5’5 and died sometime between 1985 and 1989. The help of a

A facial reconstruction expert was enlisted who was able to provide a clay molding of what the person looked like prior to death.

It is possible that the remains could have washed down the river, so communities west of Geary County are of special interest.

The Geary County Sheriff’s office is seeking the public’s help in identifying these remains.

If you have any information on this case, contact Lt. Brian Hornaday at 785-238-2261.