Center for Open Government: MCO consultant not part of Molina's original bid
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A review by the Center for Open Government of the first proposal submitted by Molina Healthcare in response to Kentucky's $8 billion solicitation for Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs) reveals consultant Emily Parento was retained by Molina only after Andy Beshear was elected Governor and had appointed Parento to his health care transition team.
The Beshear administration cancelled the original MCO awards in December 2020 only to re-issue their own RFP seven weeks later. Parento, a longtime campaign contributor to Beshear, served as the Beshear-Coleman transition team co-chair for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, which oversees Medicaid.
The Bevin administration issued the original MCO RFP in May 2019. Molina responded and was awarded one of the contracts rescinded by Beshear's Finance Cabinet.
Our review of Molina's first proposal did not find any mention of Parento as part of the their team. This contrasts with Molina's second bid that highlighted Parento as an important part of their Kentucky strategy.
To cover the bases, the Center searched the portions of Molina's 2019 response covering corporate experience, proposed staffing and subcontractors. No mention of Parento was found in those sections of the original response.
We contacted Molina's corporate office to ask if we overlooked any section of their first proposal that included Parento's role. Molina didn't reply to our emails. (Note: We will update this post if we get a response from the company).Two other questions were included in the email to Molina which we also hope to get answers to:
What, if anything, changed from the first response to the second response in terms of Molina's 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?
If Molina has answers to these questions we'd love to hear them - and will publish them.
Without those answers, this appears to be more of the same from the Frankfort swamp.