Same Thing Over

Mark Hebert is blogging about the new Health Services Secretary.

Sources tell me Janie Miller of Shelby County will be named Health and Family Services Secretary at a news conference tomorrow. Miller just took a job with EDS, which administers Kentucky's Medicaid claims.

Actually she is not very new. Janie Miller, like a number of other Beshear appointments, is another retread from past administrations.

From the Nov. 19, 2007 Herald Leader:

Miller retired from more than 30 years of work in state government much of it spent administering healthcare programs in September.

Given Miller’s resume and the current state of Medicaid in Kentucky I don’t see a lot of new and innovative ideas springing up in this Cabinet.

From the Herald Leader:

You'd think someone would be keeping track of whether reforms affecting all that money (for fiscal year 2006, about $1 billion from Kentucky's General Fund and $3.3 billion in federal funds) was being spent effectively.

You'd think wrong. Neither the cabinet administering the program nor the governor's office to which it answered nor the legislature that passed the budgets funding the program seemed to know what was going on.

Information on Medicaid and KCHIP reform "has been sparse, incomplete, potentially inaccurate," the auditor's office says.

One other thing that will probably be omitted from her biography is that she and out-going Secretary Mark Birdwhistell have had a long working relationship starting with both working in the same division of what was then the Cabinet for Human Resources in the early 1980’s.

From Health Care Financing Review, 1993

We would like to acknowledge the excellent research assistance of Maria Perozek and to thank Janie Miller and Mark Birdwhistell of the Kentucky Department for Medicaid Services for their patient and thorough explanations of the KenPAC program.


Whether Albert Einstein or Ben Franklin first said it doesn’t matter, the statement is true either way.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.