When the New York Times was touting Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’s thin qualifications to be secretary of Heath and Human Services, the only one they could come up with other than being the insurance commissioner of a state with barely enough people to populate an actuarial table was that she is “a governor running a state Medicaid program.”
Apparently, she isn’t even doing a very good job of that. An excellent Topeka reporter, Tim Carpenter at the Capital-Journal, reported this in Sunday’s paper:
The former inspector general of the Kansas Health Policy Authority says agency managers applied pressure to alter an audit report, restricted access to legal advice and threatened to fire her for meeting independently with legislators.
Allegations leveled by attorney Robin Kempf, inspector general of KHPA until November, likely will spur Senate Republicans to press ahead with a bill moving to another area of state government the job of serving as watchdog over Medicaid, MediKan and Children’s Health Insurance programs.
Kempf resigned in protest.
Editors in Kansas (including Carpenter’s, apparently) tend not to mention Sebelius in connection with things like this, and neither did the AP when they popped Carpenter’s story on the local wire, but at least the New York Times connected the dots.