These Ohio women are political superstars
We should have mentioned this in March – women’s history month – but we’re taking time now to recognize again the treasure we have in the Ohio women who broke political barriers and are still with us.
Here’s a list developed after checking with veteran former political reporters at a few other Ohio news operations – including Mary Anne Sharkey, the first woman elected president of the Ohio Legislative Correspondents Association in the 1990s:
• Nancy Hollister, who became Ohio’s first – and only to date – female governor. The Marietta resident ascended from lieutenant governor – the first woman to hold that office – to serve 11 days between the tenures of George V. Voinovich, who left to take a seat in the U.S. Senate, and incoming Bob Taft. You can read a beautiful profile of her written last month by my colleague Erica Thompson.
• Jo Ann Davidson, the pride of Reynoldsburg, was the first woman speaker of the Ohio House. (It was her autograph my daughters sought during a tour of the newly renovated Statehouse about a quarter century ago.)
• Toledo’s Marcy Kaptur, the longestserving woman in U.S. House history.
• Maureen O’connor, former prosecutor in Summit County, still on the bench as Ohio’s first female chief justice. She also is a former lieutenant governor.
• Betty D. Montgomery, both the first woman Ohio attorney general and state auditor after emerging on the statewide scene from Perrysburg near Toledo.
• Jennette Bradley, both Ohio’s first Black female lieutenant governor and state treasurer. Those both came after she won election in 1991 as the the first African American woman elected to Columbus
City Council.
• Yvette Mcgee Brown, appointed as the first Black female state Supreme Court justice in Ohio. She also was the first African-american woman elected to Franklin County Common
Pleas Court.
• Melody Stewart, the first Black women elected to the state’s highest court, a little more than two years ago.
• Newly elected Justice Jennifer Brunner was the first female secretary of state.
• Joyce Beatty, now a congresswoman representing the Columbus area, was the first Black female legislative minority leader.
• Mary Ellen Withrow was first of either gender to serve as a county, state and U.S. treasurer. Her pioneering days started early: In 1969, she became the first women elected to the Elgin Local Board of Education in her native Marion County.
The danger of compiling lists like this is overlooking someone. So tell us: Who
did we miss? Are there others we should include on the list?
And wouldn’t it be great to get all of these women together, turn on a video camera and record their stories?
Ohioans on Medicaid affected by Accellion data breach
A reader emailed wondering whether any Ohioans were affected by a data breach of Centene subsidiaries.
The answer is yes, but the number of consumers affected in Ohio remains unknown, according to the Ohio Department of Medicaid. The Accellion File Transfer Appliance hack affected some Medicaid recipients with managed-care firm Buckeye Health Plan, a subsidiary of Centene, based in St. Louis.
Medicaid staffers are working with the Ohio company to assess the impact.
The federal Health and Human Services’ breach reporting tool shows more than 1.3 million patients of Centene subsidiaries were impacted by the massive hack and subsequent data exfiltration, first reported in early February, according to Health IT Security. The web site said hackers have posted “troves of stolen data online in a mass extortion effort. A number of impacted entities have also received emails from the attackers, adding to the extortion attempts.”
How did Aetna/cvs win a $1B state contract while suing the state?
Speaking of Centene and Buckeye... Their bid to get a piece of the state’s $20 billion managed care re-procurement earlier this month remains on hold because the state is claiming in court that they illegally obtained tens of millions of dollars.
At the same time, the Medicaid department awarded nearly a $1 billion contract for the new OHIORISE program four days earlier to Aetna, which has been part of CVS for some three years after their $70 billion merger. That’s the same CVS whose pharmacy benefits manager received close to $200 million in just one year from Medicaid’s prescription drug program – three to six times the amount they should have, a Medicaid consultantcalculated.
And it’s the same CVS that is still fighting in Franklin County Common Pleas Court the state’s push to make public parts of that 2018 report that were kept secret at the time.
So how does Aetna get a deal and Centene/buckeye – which otherwise ranked second in a process that awarded contracts to six companies – doesn’t?
“All of the pharmacy and PBM and associated issues have been separated from the OHIORISE procurement,” said Medicaid Director Maureen Corcoran.
“Aetna, as the OHIORISE vendor, has no operational or relationship with pharmacy or drugs,” she added. “Aetna has operated as self-contained corporation that is focusing on this specialized population” of youth facing severe behavioral challenges.
And Aetna already has been a Medicaid vendor for a separate program in the agency.
“So we are comfortable with that,” she said. drowland@dispatch.com @darreldrowland