The Courier Journal reported on Friday that the Franklin County Circuit Court has ordered the state of Kentucky to retain Anthem as a Medicaid managed care organization (MCO). The Center for Open Government has reported extensively on the Beshear administration's mishandling of the process to select the MCO vendors.

Anthem wasn't awarded an MCO contract when Beshear rebid the program in early 2020. Anthem protested the decision and Judge Phillip Shepherd determined "Anthem had demonstrated a 'substantial likelihood' it would prevail in its claim against the state." (Courier Journal)

The Courier Journal's Debby Yetter's reporting on the development overlooked or downplayed the Beshear administration's complete bungling of the procurement. Yetter's biases are well known around Frankfort. Her advocacy-journalism played some part in the Beshear administration cancelling the original contracts awarded at the end of the Bevin administration.

Friday's article was more of the same. Yetter reported:

Anthem protested that a member of the Beshear transition team who had a role in evaluating the first round of contract awards during the transition was later hired by Molina as a consultant, which raises significant concerns of unfair bias in favor of Molina.

We counted four mentions of Emily Parento in Yetter's article where she was identified as a "member" of the Beshear transition team. It wasn't until the third to last paragraph where Yetter finally informed the reader that Parento was not just a transition team member, but the co-chair of the CHFS transition team.

As co-chair, Parento was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement to review the first responses from the companies bidding on the MCO contract. Shepherd said that under state ethics guidelines, Parento should have been barred for at least a year from working for any company involved in the Medicaid contracts after leaving the Beshear transition team. (Courier Journal)

Yetter's approach seems intended to downplay the close relationship Parento has had with the Beshear family. Parento was appointed to a high-level health care job by former Governor Steve Beshear. She and her husband have contributed nearly $10,000 to Andy Beshear since his first race for Attorney General.

Yetter wrote:

(Judge) Shepherd devoted a considerable portion of his order to examining Parento's role in the case. Anthem's lawsuit said Emily Whelan Parento, a former state health official who served on the transition staff for Beshear, was hired to assist Molina in developing an 'implementation strategy' for its managed care program.

The Center for Open Government reported in August that Molina hired Parento only after Beshear beat Bevin. For that post, we contacted Molina for answers to two questions:

• What, if anything, changed from Molina's first response to the second response in terms of their Medicaid managed care implementation strategy in Kentucky?

• Why were Parento’s services necessary to meet the implementation objectives for the second response but not the first?

Molina didn't respond.

We wrote in a July 20 post, "If Parento’s expertise created real value for Molina to position itself favorably to win the state’s business wouldn’t they have engaged her services for the first bid? Or was she brought on more for her connections to a new administration than whatever value she will contribute to the delivery of Medicaid services to Kentuckians?"

Yetter's article also noted:

He (Judge Shepherd) cited multiple irregularities of the scoring and evaluations process the state used to select the five companies that initially won the contract. Shepherd found the process to be arbitrary and poorly documented.

Had it not been for an email by a member of the contract scoring committee, it is unlikely the courts would have had critical information available to it to make the decision in favor of Anthem.

We wrote on August 17, "The MCO contracts are among the largest awarded by state government. Vendors invest an incredible amount of time, energy and resources in their preparation. It is a reasonable expectation that state government will make every effort to ensure confidence is maintained in the outcome until the very end."

The court didn't have confidence in the process. Anthem made an aggressive call taking the state to court. The model procurement code's protest process and the transparency available through Kentucky's open records statutes made the difference.

The Beshear administration couldn't have handled this thing much worse than it did. Not that you'd be able to gather that from Yetter's reporting.