The Murray-Calloway County Hospital Board of Trustees Personnel Committee will meet at 1 p.m. in the hospital’s Garrison Boardroom and via Zoom (call 270-762-1102 for Zoom connection details).
Murray Architectural Review Board SPECIAL CALLED Meeting
The Murray Architectural Review Board will hold a special called meeting at 4:30 p.m. at City Hall.
MCCH Board of Trustees Personnel Committee Regular Meeting
The Murray-Calloway County Hospital Board of Trustees Personnel Committee will meet at 1 p.m. in the hospital’s Garrison Boardroom and via Zoom (call 270-762-1102 for Zoom connection details).
MCCH Board of Trustees Finance Committee Regular Meeting
The Murray-Calloway County Hospital Board of Trustees Finance Committee will meet at noon in the hospital’s Garrison Board Room and via Zoom (call 270-762-1102 for Zoom connection details).
MCCH Board of Trustees Personnel Committee Regular Meeting
The Murray-Calloway County Hospital Board of Trustees Personnel Committee will meet at 1 p.m. in the hospital’s Garrison Boardroom and via Zoom (call 270-762-1102 for Zoom connection details).
Bill that KY hospitals said they need fell victim to dizzying last-minute changes in House
By Deborah Yetter/Kentucky Lantern | March 19, 2025
A bill Kentucky hospitals say was essential to preserving funds for charity care appears dead after lawmakers in the House late Friday rolled Senate Bill 14 — plus several other health measures — into a single bill, effectively killing it.
In announcing the demise of his SB 14 — meant to strengthen access to a federal program that raises money from pharmaceutical companies — an angry Sen. Stephen Meredith, R-Leitchfield, compared it to the Kenny Rogers’ song “Lucille.”
“I’ve seen some good times and I’ve seen some bad times, but this time the hurting won’t heal,” Meredith said in a Friday night speech on the Senate floor.
“It’s crushing to me,” he added, saying it puts funding from the 340B Drug Pricing Program for health care at risk throughout Kentucky. “This is not just a luxury, this is a lifeline, a financial lifeline for many of our communities.
The House action Friday also killed an unrelated bill sought by the state’s largest treatment program, Addiction Recovery Care, or ARC, to protect Medicaid payments for treatment services.
Senate Bill 153, sponsored by Sen. Craig Richardson, R-Hopkinsville, would have placed limits on how insurance companies that handle most of Kentucky’s Medicaid claims can restrict payments to providers they consider “outliers.”
But in a dizzying series of changes, the House deleted contents of SB 153, replacing it with Meredith’s SB 14, as well as several other measures, effectively killing them all. With only two days left in the session, it’s too late to revive them, sponsors say.
By turning SB 153 into Meredith’s SB 14 — among other changes —“in that moment, the bill was dead,” Richardson said in an email.
“It will be a fight for next session,” Richardson said.
Meredith said Richardson, a freshman lawmaker, afterwards expressed surprise at the outcome.
“I told him, ‘Welcome to the General Assembly,’” Meredith said.
‘Unworkable’ changes
Also included in the now-defunct bill was a measure by Rep. Kimberly Poore Moser, R-Taylor Mill, to create new, detailed reporting requirements for nonprofit hospitals and clinics on funds they receive through the 340B program.
Moser had argued at a committee hearing that such measures were needed to improve “transparency.”
Meredith said the reporting requirements were excessive and “just ridiculous.”
And the Kentucky Hospital Association, which had lobbied heavily for Meredith’s SB 14, said it could not support the newly-created version, describing the reporting requirements as “counterproductive.”
The changes “make the program unworkable, and Kentucky’s hospitals cannot embrace such legislation,” said a statement from a spokesperson.
Not everyone was disappointed.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, along with several other industry and employer groups, had opposed SB 14, arguing the 340B program has expanded too rapidly with little oversight and must be better managed. They argue 340B must be reformed by Congress, which created it in 1992 and has done little to check its growth.
It has devolved into a program in which hospitals and clinics get prescription drugs at steep discounts, and then, for insured patients, bill Medicaid and private insurance companies for the market price and pocket the difference, they said.
Calling it a “hospital markup program,” PhRMA spokesman Reid Porter said the discussion in Kentucky underscores the need for federal action.
“It must shift from a loophole benefiting tax-exempt hospitals at the expense of Kentuckians to a system that truly supports vulnerable patients and communities,” he said. “We appreciate the legislators who prioritized transparency and took steps to bring greater accountability to how 340B is used and we continue to support these changes at the federal level.”
ARC and the FBI
As for the original version of SB 153, it had drawn opposition from the Kentucky Association of Health Plans, or KAHP, which represents insurers and pointed out that ARC, one of the bill’s chief backers, is under investigation by the FBI for possible health care fraud.
SB 153 — meant to limit how private insurers known as managed care organizations, or MCOs, can withhold Medicaid payments they find questionable — would make it harder to act in such cases, it said in a March 12 news release prior to changes to SB 153 that killed it.
“The federal government is cracking down on waste, fraud and abuse,” Tom Stephens, KAHP CEO, said in the news release. “What kind of message does it send that Kentucky is doing the exact opposite.”
This week, Stephens welcomed the end of SB 153.
“We appreciate voices in the General Assembly arguing for real accountability,” Stephens said. “We have witnessed that a lack of guardrails has been a boon for disreputable providers and resulted in significant abuse of taxpayer dollars.
The FBI has not brought any charges in the investigation of ARC that it announced in August.
ARC has said it provides quality treatment services and is cooperating with the FBI.
‘The white flag’
Meredith, a former hospital CEO who was pushing his 340B bill for the second year, vowed he’s not giving up on legislation he said is needed to preserve health services, especially in rural areas where hospitals are struggling.
With potential Medicaid cuts looming at the federal level, Meredith said action is urgently needed.
“I guess I’ve got to wave the white flag on this one for this session but it will be back in 2026,” he said in Friday’s speech to fellow lawmakers. “I’m not just asking you for help on this, I’m begging you.”
In an interview, Meredith said the 340B program brings in about $250 million a year that hospitals and clinics, rural and urban, use to shore up charity care services. It doesn’t all have to go for direct care for patients who can’t pay, he said.
For example, one rural hospital uses proceeds to enhance nurses’ salaries to avoid losing them to larger hospital systems that pay more. Others use proceeds to enhance cancer care or other treatment they couldn’t otherwise afford.
“The program was never meant to provide charity care as much as it was to provide access to care,” he said.
Without his bill’s protection, pharmaceutical companies will continue to try to limit discounts and the type of drugs shipped to Kentucky, which will erode 340B funds, he said adding, “It just boggles my mind we’re willing to walk away from $250 million a year.”
This article was originally published by Kentucky Lantern. Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
Deborah Yetter is an independent journalist who previously worked for 38 years for The Courier Journal, where she focused on child welfare and health and human services. She lives in Louisville and has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville. She is a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame.
Press release: West KY NOW hosts panel discussion to honor Women’s History Month
MURRAY – In celebration of Women’s History Month, the West Kentucky chapter of the National Organization for Women (West KY NOW) and WKMS host a panel discussion on Monday, March 31, 2025, entitled “Women Who Lead: Inspiring Action and Building Their Communities.” The panel will be from 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm in meeting room B of the Calloway County Public Library in Murray, KY. The doors will open at 5:30 with light snacks and an opportunity to drop off donations for area blessing boxes. Guests are encouraged to bring non-perishable items and period products.
Panelists for the night include Carruth Kitrell, Robyn Pizzo and Noraa Ransey with Constance Alexander moderating. These women are all leading change in our region with hard work and dedication to numerous causes.
Kitrell is on the Board of Directors of Needline in Murray, KY. and is the Administrative Assistant to the Dean of the Jesse D. Jones College of Science, Engineering and Technology at Murray State University. Pizzo is communication specialist at the Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs and an elected member of the Murray Independent School Board. Ransey, an elementary teacher in the Calloway County Public School System was the 2020 KEA Teacher of the Year while also serving on the board of Soup for the Soul in Murray, KY. Alexander is president of INTEX Communications and founding board member of The Murray Sentinel and has won numerous awards for her work in journalism and the arts including the Governor’s Award in the Arts/Media.
The evening will include discussions with the panelists about their experiences in community service and ways young women and girls can start now to become engaged and give back to their communities. The event is free and open to the public.
West KY NOW is a multi-issue, multi-strategy organization that takes a holistic approach to women’s rights. Through advocacy, education and outreach, our priorities are winning economic equality and securing it with an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that will guarantee equal rights for women; championing abortion rights, reproductive freedom, and other women’s health issues; opposing racism; fighting bigotry against the LGBTQIA community; and ending violence against women.
More information can be found on the facebook event or by emailing westkynow@gmail.com
Murray Board of Education SPECIAL CALLED Meeting
The Murray Board of Education will hold a special called meeting at 4 p.m. See agenda.
Sunshine Week: Support Local Journalism (OPINION)
By Gene Policinski
Editor’s note: This article was written in 2024. Sunshine Week 2025 dates are March 16-22.
Sunshine Week is March 10-16, and this year, there’s an even greater need for you to get involved.
Sunshine Week annually celebrates freedom of information laws in every state. It also salutes efforts by good government advocates and journalists to use and ensure the effectiveness of those laws to get the information we need as self-governing citizens.
The name is a play on the commonsense words spoken more than a century ago by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
Brandeis’ remark was not made in a court opinion. It was in a 1913 article published in the news magazine Harper’s Weekly. Along with its observations on American culture and events, Harper’s was part of the “muckraking” news era, with journalists holding business and government accountable for corruption, waste and illegal activity.
As a special treat of each Sunshine Week, we get to see current examples of news reporting on behalf of the public, the type of journalism that the nation’s founders had in mind when they adopted strong First Amendment protection for a free press.
Sunshine Week was started in 2005 by the American Society of News Editors. The Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications is coordinating Sunshine Week for the first time this year.
Each year, we celebrate the thousands of local, state and national print, TV, radio and online reports that tell us what the government or others are doing and how they are doing it; reports that explore and expose otherwise-unseen information we need to know to make good decisions at the ballot box, when petitioning for change or simply things we should know about our communities.
Just a few examples, from a 2023 New York Times report:
- In the Hunter Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, idle freight trains blocked a main road, sometimes for more than 30 hours, potentially blocking ambulances and fire trucks.
- In Colorado, a libertarian “food freedom” movement has re-energized a long battle over the safety of unpasteurized milk.
- A city manager in DuBois, Pennsylvania, gave himself raises and allegedly took hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.
- After bus issues caused school closures in Jefferson County, Kentucky, two reporters followed one school bus trying to complete an impossible route.
- An investigative report of wage theft in New York State uncovered rampant abuse in the horse racing industry, with repeat offenders owing workers more than $4.4 million.
But this year as we celebrate that work being done on behalf of democracy, there is an increasingly needed partner in that work: You and your support for local journalists.
The number of journalists continues to plummet, from more than 75,000 newsroom jobs in 2005 to 31,860 in 2022, according to the Medill Local News Initiative. Far too many of us now live in “news deserts,” areas across the nation where not a single news outlet exists. Medill reported that in 2023, that out of 3,143 counties nationwide, 204 counties had no newspapers, local digital sites, public radio newsrooms or ethnic publications, and another 228 counties were at substantial risk of losing all local news media.
Even where there are established news media outlets, economic pressures have resulted in staff cuts that mean there is less coverage of local government institutions like the city council, school board and local courts.
We need to face the fact that there just aren’t enough journalists to do the job of monitoring and reporting on government, business and others.
To be sure, journalists and free press advocates are working to cut those losses and to buttress the flow of information to the public. There are new projects to fund local reporting or produce statewide or local reports, including the American Journalism Project; the Indiana Local News Initiative; Signal, a nonprofit organization in Ohio; and Houston Landing, a recently launched Texas publication.
Student-operated news media at several universities are reporting on their communities as well as their campuses. Student journalists are sometimes providing the only full-time reporting in some communities. Innovative nonprofit statewide news operations such as Wisconsin Watch, South Dakota News Watch and The Maine Monitor report, investigate and examine issues in their states.
Among notable national efforts: Freedom Forum funds two reporters, in Tennessee and Florida, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, who are dedicated to the First Amendment beat. The Lenfest Institute for Journalism provides tools and resources for local journalism leaders. The Knight Foundation has been a longtime advocate and supporter of efforts to energize local news outlets and nonprofit journalism operations.
But even with all those long-term and new initiatives, more help is needed. Let’s turn again to Brandeis, who according to an article by the Sunlight Foundation in 2009, said in that Harper’s article, “The individual citizen must in some way collect and spread the information” through civic groups and the press, which he believed would lead to “remedial action.”
This does not necessarily mean filing a Freedom of Information request. There are ways to help hold government accountable beyond this direct action.
Whether you are red or blue, progressive or conservative, Democrat, Republican or independent, you need to support those who do that investigative work on a daily basis.
Get behind and get engaged with those who use FOI laws and shoe-leather journalism to bring you the facts required for real self-governance. Take that that information and make up your own minds about the concerns of the day where you live – and perhaps give the national pundit class a rest.
Open your eyes, your minds – and, yes, perhaps your wallets too – and bring a little sunlight into your life. Celebrate Sunshine Week. Justice Brandeis would be pleased, and you and your fellow citizens will be better off for the effort.
Gene Policinski is a veteran multimedia journalist and First Amendment advocate. He is one of the founding editors of USA TODAY and is senior fellow for the First Amendment at Freedom Forum.
Bensenhaver: Lawmakers used lies and half-truths to secure passage of open records bill (OPINION)
By Amye Bensenhaver
There’s a picture that apparently exists in the minds of the majority of Kentucky lawmakers.
It’s a picture of a law enforcement agency’s harried records custodian recklessly, and without reference to the law – much less public safety – releasing banker’s boxes of investigative records to morbidly curious open records requesters or requesters with bad intent.
That picture is entirely false.
The reverse of that picture is of a law enforcement agency’s uncooperative records custodian jealously withholding banker’s boxes of investigative records – without reference to the law and underlying facts – from media requesters, concerned citizens, or aggrieved family members of victims (and even perpetrators) searching for answers. It, too, is false.
The truth lies somewhere in between. In most cases, however, it is closer to the second picture than the first.
A culture of secrecy is embedded in law enforcement, and records custodians tend to err on the side of nondisclosure.
For decades, law enforcement has, with the blessing of Kentucky’s Attorneys General past and present, summarily denied access to investigative records in open criminal investigations by simply noting that fact in boilerplate responses. They rarely reviewed the requested records to separate exempt from nonexempt information (and release the latter) as required of all other public agencies. [See KRS 61.878(4)]
Law enforcement treated an investigative file as a single record. That record was exempt because the underlying investigation was open.
Rest assured, there are no cases in Kentucky where a records custodian has inadvertently disclosed a record that identified an informant (statutorily excluded from access since the law’s enactment); a witness (“categorically” excluded from access under the Supreme Court’s holding in Kentucky New Era v City of Hopkinsville); or an undercover police officer in responding to an open records request.
Last year’s Shively Police Department v Courier Journal threatened law enforcement’s comfortable, but legally unsupportable, “status quo.” By rejecting a much-used alternative argument under a separate statute – which was believed to require no showing of harm while an investigation was open – and affirming a 2013 case recognizing that harm was not presumed from the “open” status of the case, law enforcement found itself in the same position as every other public agency that denies access – forced to meet its burden of proof to sustain denial of an open records request on a case by case basis.
That is when lobbyists and law enforcement sprung into action, urging lawmakers to pass a bill that would reverse the damage and restore law enforcement’s comfortable “status quo.” That is when “would” became “could” and actual harm became merely possible harm.
The committee hearings and floor debates on HB 520 exposed such a fundamental misunderstanding of the law enforcement exception to the open records law that we must assume picture one floats in the minds of a substantial number of uninformed lawmaker who were vulnerable to law enforcement’s and lobbyists’ false narratives.
Let’s correct these false narratives. We can, without fear of successful repudiation, assure Kentuckians.
• If an investigation, such as the drug investigation Rep. Fugate described, is conducted by more than one law enforcement agency (either another states’ or federal), investigative records in Kentucky’s possession need not be released to a requester, even if Kentucky’s investigation is concluded.
Kentucky agencies can rely on the law enforcement exception at the request of, and on behalf of, another state or the FBI if those agencies’ investigations remain open and they confirm that Kentucky should withhold the records and why. Thus, numerous Attorney General’s open records decisions recognize:
“Where there is concurrent jurisdiction between two agencies, and they both have an interest in the matter being investigated, the records of one agency may be withheld, under authority of KRS 61.878(1)[(h)], if premature release of the requested records would harm the ongoing investigation and prospective law enforcement action of the other agency.”
• The law enforcement exception has rarely been amended during its long history. In the early nineties lawmakers added a permanent exclusion for Commonwealth’s and County Attorneys’ criminal litigation files. The exception was also re-numbered as other exceptions were added to KRS 61.878(1). One proposed change from the Senate committee sub was irresponsibly, and some would say shamelessly, added. By clear and thoughtful design, the Attorney General’s criminal litigation files were not given permanent protection from public inspection by past legislatures as Commonwealth’s and County Attorneys’ were. There are critical but nuanced reasons for this dichotomy which I am happy to discuss if the sponsor of the Senate committee sub cares to understand.
• Supporters of the bill who testified at the Senate State and Local Government Committee implied that lawmakers’ concerns should be assuaged by the final sentence in HB 520. The law enforcement exception has always concluded with this sentence, “The exemptions provided by this subsection shall not be used by the custodian of the records to delay or impede the exercise of rights granted by KRS 61.870 to 61.884[.]” That language is nothing new.
That dog won’t hunt.
• No doubt, some investigations may be open for a short duration. It was surprising to learn from Rep. Fugate that one to one and one-half years is the norm for multistate drug investigations. In my experience as an assistant attorney general reviewing open records appeal over 25 years, many cases, if not most cases, remain open over a significantly longer period of time. Some are deemed open for decades (even if inactive) – in one extreme case, for 25 years, and another, in excess of 40 years.
• Elected state representatives who live in glass houses should not throw stones. A March 15 Middletown Town Hall featured comments from one such legislator that were both misleading and bullying. The remarks targeted unnamed open government advocacy groups and individual advocates for “saying words that sound really damning” unless you know the facts.
In the cynical belief that no one knew the law as well as he, the representative proceeded to extoll the virtues of HB 520 because it authorizes nondisclosure of investigative records of a law enforcement agency, while the investigation is open, if the agency can articulate “the reasons” for denial. It is also worthy of support, he argued, because it empowers a requester dissatisfied with a law enforcement agency’s denial of a request to appeal that denial to the Attorney General.
Anyone who knows anything about the Kentucky Open Records Act knows that the law has afforded these protections to the agency and to the public for decades. No open government advocate opposed the HB 520 on these grounds.
It was the dilution of the harm requirement – substituting “could” for “would” in a way that lends itself to the long rejected presumption of harm simply because a case is open – to which we objected.
Perhaps the representative should consider if it isn’t he who is “saying words that sound really damning” to stir up support for a bill that, in the final analysis, is likely to do more harm than good to the public’s right to know.
Whether it will, and what that harm will look like, only time will tell.
Amye Bensenhaver is a co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. After spending 25 years as the assistant attorney general, she is an expert on Kentucky’s open records and open meetings law.
