WICHITA- A Kansas man was injured in an accident just before 11a.m. on Saturday in Sedgwick County.

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 2015 Chevy truck driven by Marvin E. Emley, 74 Emporia, was on the southbound exit ramp from Interstate 135 to 29th Street in Wichita.

The truck left the roadway to the right, went through a fence, and struck a stone embankment.

Emley was transported to St. Francis Medical Center.

He was properly restrained at the time of the accident, according the KHP

In May, the FCC, along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and state attorneys general, announced that Verizon Wireless would pay $90 million and Sprint Corporation would pay $68 million to settle investigations that revealed the companies billed customers millions of dollars in unauthorized third-party premium text messaging services, according to a statement from the Federal Communications Commission.

The two cases brought a total of $353 million in penalties and restitution against the U.S.’s four largest wireless carriers, structuring these settlements so that $267.5 million of the total will be returned to affected customers.

Customers have until December 31 to submit claims through www.cfpbsettlementverizon.com  and www.sprintrefundpsms.com  Consumers with questions about the redress programs can call 1-877-389-8787 for the Sprint case, or 1-888-726-7063 for Verizon.

AT&T customers can submit claims through www.ftc.gov/att or call 1-877-819-9692 for more information.

What is cramming?

Cramming is the illegal act of placing unauthorized charges on your wireline, wireless, or bundled services telephone bill. The FCC has estimated that cramming has harmed tens of millions of American households.

Deception is the hallmark of cramming. Crammers often rely on confusing telephone bills to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe.

Wireless consumers should be particularly vigilant. Smartphones are sophisticated handheld devices that enable consumers to shop online from wherever they are or charge app purchases to their phone bills. The more your mobile phone bill begins to resemble a credit card bill, the more difficult it may become to spot unauthorized charges.

How does cramming occur?

Cramming most often occurs when telephone companies allow other providers of goods or services to place charges on their customers’ telephone bills, enabling a telephone number to be used like a credit or debit card account number for vendors. Crammers may attempt to place a charge on a consumer’s phone bill having nothing other than an active telephone number, which can be obtained from a telephone directory.

What do cramming charges look like?

Cramming comes in many forms.  Charges – such as those described below – may be legitimate if authorized but, if unauthorized, are cramming:

• Charges for services that are explained on your telephone bill in general terms such as “service fee,”  “service charge,” “other fees,” “voicemail,” “mail server,” “calling plan” and “membership.”
• Charges that are added to your telephone bill every month without a clear explanation of the services provided – such as a “monthly fee” or “minimum monthly usage fee.”
• Charges for specific services or products you may not have authorized, like ringtones, cell phone wallpaper, or “premium” text messages about sports scores, celebrity gossip, flirting tips or daily horoscopes.

How can I protect myself against cramming?

• Carefully review your telephone bill every month, just as closely as you review your monthly credit card and bank statements.
• Ask yourself the following questions as you review your telephone bill:
  • Do I recognize the names of all the companies listed on my bill?
  • What services were provided by the listed companies?
  • Does my bill include charges for calls I did not place or services I did not authorize?
  • Are the rates and line items consistent with the rates and line items that the company quoted to me?
• When in doubt, ask questions.  You may be billed for a call you placed or a service you used, but the description listed on your telephone bill for the call or service may be unclear.  If you don’t know what service was provided for a charge listed on your bill, ask your telephone company to explain the charge before paying it.
• Make sure you know what service was provided, even for small charges.  Cramming often goes undetected as very small “mystery charges” – sometimes only $1, $2, or $3 – to thousands of consumers.  Crammed charges can remain on bills for years.
• Keep a record of the services you have authorized and used. These records can be helpful when billing descriptions are unclear.
• Carefully read all forms and promotional materials – including the fine print – before signing up for telephone or other services to be billed on your phone bill.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Three men are charged in a computer hacking and spamming scheme that federal prosecutors in New Jersey say compromised the personal information of 60 million people.

Authorities say the men operated a business known as A Whole Lot of Nothing that sent spam emails on behalf of clients including insurance companies and online pharmacies.

The indictment charges 30-year-old Timothy Livingston of Boca Raton, Florida, 32-year-old Tomasz Chmielarz of Rutherford, New Jersey, and 27-year-old Devin McArthur of Ellicott City, Maryland, with conspiracy and fraud charges.

McArthur is accused of helping to steal confidential business information.

The names of the companies were not released.

Chmielarz’s lawyer has not seen the indictment and could not comment. A message was left seeking comment from Livingston’s lawyer. It could not be determined if McArthur has a lawyer.

By ANDY MARSO

A federal mental health bill has ignited a debate about organizations that receive federal funding to advocate for the rights of people with disabilities, including mental illness. U.S. House Resolution 2646, introduced in June and named the “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act” by supporters, is a sweeping 173-page rewrite of the nation’s mental health system.

There is much in the bill that mental health advocates like, including the creation of a National Mental Health Policy Laboratory within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a study of the costs of incarcerating people with severe mental illness.

But one provision near the end of the bill has created concern about the ability of groups like the Disability Rights Center of Kansas to fight for the civil rights of people who have disabilities, including mental illness.

“I think there’s a lot of positive features of the bill,” said Rick Cagan, executive director of the Kansas branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI. “NAMI national certainly supports it, and we have been urging them to take a strong advocacy position to remove the provisions from the bill that would affect the protection and advocacy organizations like the Disability Rights Center.”

The Disability Rights Center is part of a network of organizations across the country that operate under Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness, or PAIMI, laws enacted in the 1980s. Under PAIMI, the organizations receive federal funds to protect the rights of Americans with mental illnesses, including their right to direct their own health care if they are competent to do so.

The chief sponsor of the new federal bill, U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, a Republican from Pennsylvania, is a psychologist, and the bill has the support of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit that says its mission is to eliminate barriers to the treatment of mental illness.

The Treatment Advocacy Center contends that PAIMI groups like the Disability Rights Center have overstepped their bounds and in some cases are advising people with mental illness of their right to refuse treatment, against the wishes of parents and loved ones.

The Treatment Advocacy Center also has clashed with PAIMI groups in several states over legislation that would make it easier to obtain a court order to force people with mental illness to take a prescribed medication or other form of outpatient treatment.

Assisted outpatient therapy 

A key portion of Murphy’s bill would withhold grant funding to the five states — Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Tennessee — that do not allow assisted outpatient treatment, which is a form of involuntary commitment. For people with mental illness to be committed to an inpatient facility against their will, most states require that they be shown to be a danger to themselves or others.

Assisted outpatient treatment laws use a lower standard — usually that the person is too ill to recognize their own need for medical care — to require, by court order, outpatient treatments such as medication. T

he Treatment Advocacy Center is a major proponent of assisted outpatient treatment laws, while PAIMI groups have challenged them in several states as unproven programs that infringe on the civil liberties of people with mental health issues.

Murphy’s bill seeks to curtail lobbying by the PAIMI groups and limits their legal advocacy work to the prevention of “abuse and neglect” of Americans with disabilities. Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Disability Rights Center of Kansas, said the lobbying portion of the bill is redundant because PAIMI groups already are prohibited from using their federal funding for political advocacy.

But he said the other portion related to the PAIMI groups would destroy the Disability Rights Center’s legal advocacy and is an overreaction to unfair allegations against Disability Rights Center staff in other states. “They’re responding to an anecdote with a nuclear bomb,” Nichols said.

He said the Murphy bill would prevent the Disability Rights Center from doing things unrelated to mental health, like helping children with learning disabilities get special education, investigating possible Medicare fraud by doctors prescribing unnecessary and unwanted treatments for people with disabilities, and advocating for fair housing and employment.

Mary Jean Billingsley testified against Murphy’s bill at a congressional subcommittee hearing in June on behalf of her adult son, a Johnson County resident with a developmental disability. Billingsley told the subcommittee that the Disability Rights Center is helping her family fight a city government that is trying to use zoning ordinances to close her son’s group home because some residents don’t want “those people” living in their neighborhood.

“If this bill were law, the PAIMI program would have been prohibited from helping our son with legal advocacy in this housing discrimination case because it is not ‘abuse or neglect,’” Billingsley said. According to Nichols, 80 percent of the cases DRC worked in 2015 would not fit into the parameters set by Murphy’s bill.

Preventing abuse 

The Murphy bill allows the Disability Rights Center to try to intervene in cases of abuse and neglect. But Nichols said the bill would prohibit the Disability Rights Center from interfering between caregivers and people with mental illness, making it a challenge to intervene when the “caregivers” themselves are committing abuse and neglect.

That was the case at the Kaufman House in Newton, where social worker Arlan Kaufman and his wife, Linda, a registered nurse, ran a group home for people with mental illness and abused the residents for 20 years. State agencies and local law enforcement had received reports of abuse at the house but failed to substantiate them.

The Disability Rights Center helped one resident assert her legal rights to leave the facility in 2004, then assisted with an FBI investigation that revealed evidence of decades of sexual and physical abuse.  The Kaufmans were convicted of a slate of criminal abuse charges the following year.

Nancy Jensen, a former resident who calls herself a “survivor” of the Kaufman House, said she tried to raise alarms about what the Kaufmans were doing. But until the Disability Rights Center staff arrived, no one believed her because she had a mental illness and the Kaufmans were respected in their community. She said one night she harmed herself intentionally because she thought that if the Kaufmans took her to a hospital, the hospital staff would have to help her escape. “A nurse practitioner was cleaning me up and asked me why I did it,” Jensen said.

“Before I had a chance to answer, Linda said, ‘She’s one of ours.’ And that was all the lady needed to know. She walked out.” Jensen also traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify against the PAIMI provisions in Murphy’s bill.

The concerns that she and others raised already have affected the Kansas congressional delegation’s stance on the bill. U.S. Rep. Kevin Yoder, a Republican who represents the Kansas City, Kan., area, was one of the bill’s more than 170 co-sponsors in October.

But a spokesman for Yoder’s office said he pulled his sponsorship at the end of November after hearing from the Disability Rights Center. U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, a Republican who represents the rest of eastern Kansas, said she has long been an advocate for mental health reform, but she can’t support the Murphy bill in its current form.

“This bill goes too far in taking away the legal rights of patients — especially by completely dismantling the critically important Protection and Advocacy for Individuals with Mental Illness (PAIMI) program,” Jenkins said via email. “I’ve had numerous conversations with the author of the bill and the chairman of the committee it’s being debated in and am working for revisions.”

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

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas lawmaker is calling for an end to his state’s privatized care system as its 20th anniversary nears and scrutiny of the agency in charge of it rises.

Republican Rep. Mike Kiegerl, an Olathe Republican, wrote a report that was among more than 100 pages of documents provided to the Legislature’s Special Committee on Foster Care Adequacy, which met for a day last month and wants to arrange more meetings.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports Kiegerl has been a critic of the foster care system for years. He says the privatized system should either end or be radically overhauled.

Kiegerl’s comments come as the Department for Children and Families is facing questions over the deaths of multiple children in the foster care system.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — Officials at Clinton Wildlife Area say illegal off-road drivers are causing damage around Clinton Lake that has forced the closure of some roads.

The Lawrence Journal-World reports the Rock Creek Boat Ramp on the southwest side of the lake and portions of Green Road on the wildlife area’s western edge were closed because of damage.

Justin Hamilton with the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks says potholes and ruts have developed because of the damage, making some pathways unnavigable.

He says some areas around Douglas State Fishing Lake near Baldwin City also were damaged recently by off-road driving, and there have been issues with people driving in muddy fields after crops have been harvested.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A man seeking asylum in the United States has reunited with his family in Wichita after spending 2½ years in an Arizona detention facility.

The Wichita Eagle reports that Hector Yaujar arrived in Wichita on Wednesday. Yaujar was living in Wichita with his wife, Claudia Amaro, when he was deported in 2005 for allegedly using a fake Social Security number.

Amaro followed her husband to Mexico with their son, but she eventually returned to the U.S., where she was briefly detained in Eloy, Arizona in 2013. When Yaujar tried to re-enter the country two months later, he was detained at that facility for more than two years.

He was released on $8,000 bond.

The couple requested asylum in the U.S. in 2013. Their case goes to court in 2019.

JONATHAN LEMIRE, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — President Barack Obama urged states and cities to join him in expanding benefits to new mothers and fathers when he signed an executive order this year directing agencies to allow federal workers to take six weeks of paid leave to care for a newborn.

Progress has been slow — but momentum is building.

This week, New York City became one of a handful of cities to move to grant six weeks of paid leave. Others that already have include Pittsburgh and Austin, Texas.

Other cities have adopted smaller measures, while some private companies have created generous, multi-month packages.

But many municipalities haven’t launched programs because of financial or political constraints.

The U.S. is one of a few countries that don’t offer paid maternity leave.

RED CLOUD, Neb. (AP) — Authorities say a Kansas man has been killed in a south-central Nebraska highway crash.

The accident was reported around 5 p.m. Wednesday on Nebraska Highway 78, east of Red Cloud in Webster County.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the Webster County Sheriff’s Office identified the victim as 75-year-old George Pfrimmer, of Mankato, Kansas.