A couple of stories I’ve reported this week on Jennie Stuart Health — one about concerns that the local hospital could be sold and the other about a meeting of the board that oversees Jennie Stuart Medical Center — prompted several readers to message me with questions about whether our state open government laws provide any help in requiring transparency from Hopkinsville’s community hospital.
The short answer is, no. The Kentucky Open Meetings and Open Records laws do not apply to Jennie Stuart for two key reasons. The hospital is not a public agency, as defined by the open meetings law, and it does not receive at least 25% of its funding from a local or state agency.
One reader questioned why Medicare and Medicaid payments to Jennie Stuart don’t count as government funding under the open records law.
It’s a good question, so I ran it by Amye Bensenhaver, a retired state assistant attorney general. Amye and I are co-founders of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition, a nonprofit established in 2019. The coalition works to arm everyday Kentuckians with the information they need to make good use our state’s open government laws, which are also known as sunshine laws.
Amye needed very little time to confirm what she already understood about the Medicare/Medicaid question. She went to our coalition’s website and opened up the Kentucky Sunshine Law Library. She typed “Medicare” and “Medicaid” into the search field and found information from a 1993 Kentucky Attorney General’s decision which states, in part, “… this Office found that a radiology practice owned by a private physician was not a ‘public agency’ for purposes of the Act simply because it was compensated through Medicare and Medicaid for professional services rendered to patients.”
As Amye reminded me, I didn’t really need her help to find this information. The coalition’s law library is a highly effective and free tool that anyone can use if they have a question about Kentucky’s open government laws.
We have another board member at the Kentucky Open Government Coalition to thank for this excellent tool. Scott Horn, who lives in Lexington, developed and curated the law library. It is, Amye wrote, “the largest freely accessible collection of Kentucky Attorney General opinions and decisions (1977-present), along with primary resources on par with, if not superior to, cost-prohibitive commercial legal research platforms.”
Next week at the University of Kentucky, Scott will be recognized for his efforts when he receives the 2024 James Madison Award for service to the First Amendment. It is presented annually by the UK School of Journalism and Media and its Scripps Howard First Amendment Center, housed in the College of Communication and Information.
Amye (2016) and I (2013) are past recipients of the Madison award, along with another coalition board member, attorney Jeremy Rogers (2018), of Louisville. You can read more about the James Madison Award here.
Last week when I was at Jennie Stuart waiting to speak to someone after a hospital board meeting, a physician approached me to say something about the importance of transparency. I can’t fully describe how encouraging it is to journalists when people in other fields of work speak so clearly on the public’s right to know about consequential decisions being made on their behalf.
State and federal open government laws are for the benefit of everyone — not just reporters and attorneys. The laws are strengthened and protected when more people understand them and use them. The need for a broad appreciation of these laws was the central motivation when Amye Bensenhaver and I first spoke about establishing the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
Although the Kentucky open government laws do not provide direct access to more information about Jennie Stuart, there are other paths to transparency. Stay tuned. We are working to answer questions we’re hearing from Hoptown Chronicle readers.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
