Oregon government made a promise to Oregonians years ago: Government was going to be transparent about what it does and how it spends money.

The days of decisions made behind closed doors were over. But that promise has seesawed between sincere and masquerade. With Oregon’s coordinated care organizations, it tipped recently toward masquerade.

Oregon’s CCOs oversee Medicaid services in the state. They handle billions of dollars. About 1 million Oregonians get services from CCOs. The regional CCOs get money from the state. The amount they get is based on their number of patients, how sick the patients are and the cost of the health care in that region. CCOs make decisions about spending that money to serve those patients.

The CCOs are under a five-year contract with the Oregon Health Authority. And now with those contracts up for renewal, the Oregon Health Authority has turned to the public to get feedback on how to improve the contracts.

How about transparency? How about requiring that the board meetings of CCOs be open to the public?

Don’t expect it. The Oregon Legislature took a well-meaning bill — House Bill 4018 — that was intended to create more transparency for CCOs and turned it into something masquerading as real reform.

When the bill was introduced, it would have required CCO boards to operate according to Oregon’s open meetings laws — be transparent. The boards could still go into executive session to discuss sensitive matters. But under the state’s open meetings laws, not only the final decisions of government are public, but the public also gets insight into the decision-making — the debates, the alternatives, the thinking.

But HB 4018 was rewritten before it passed to cripple it. It now says the board meetings have to be open only when “substantive decisions are made final.” What’s a substantive decision? That could very well be defined as just the decisions the CCO wants the public to know about. And forget about learning what alternative policies were considered and what trade-offs were made.

CCOs could decide for themselves that because they handle so much taxpayer money and because they make critical health decisions for so many Oregonians that they are going to follow the state’s public meetings laws. Don’t count on it. Oregonians have their Legislature to thank.