Monday, April 11, 2011

Is this really transparency?

The Bluegrass Institute recently sent an open records request to the Office of the Governor. You can view the full request here.  In brief, the request was meant to obtain "detailed plans, analysis, projections and summaries with supporting documentation..." that the administration had that led it to claim that the Medicaid budget would break even in 2012 without budget cuts to supplement Medicaid funding.

This request was denied.

The administration denied the request based on the law specifying that only specifically described records obligate a public agency to respond.  So unless you actually work in the office you are making the request of, chances are you have no idea what the exact name of the document you want would be.

My question would be, is this really transparency?

The current administration continues to tout itself as a champion of transparency.  Here is an idea on how they can take it a step further: honor records requests to show the facts and thought processes behind the administration's Medicaid policies.


Read more about Operation: Open Records 2011

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They can't send you the information if they never had it.

Anonymous said...

This is NOT transparency!

Anonymous said...

If Anon 7:07 is right and they don't have any information about how they arrived at their claims, that's just pathetic.