If Oregonians learned anything from the state’s missteps and blunders with Cover Oregon it should be two things: It’s not easy to make changes in health care. And government should not hide what it is doing from the public.

The state of Oregon could be making similar spectacular mistakes or significant changes with its other health care experiment — coordinated care organizations — and the public would not know.

CCOs are Oregon’s major effort at health care transformation. They are community organizations that essentially take over providing care for Oregon Health Plan members in a region. Central Oregon’s three counties have their own CCO.

CCOs get a fixed budget from the state based on how many patients they serve. They strive to hit various targets that the state and the federal government have set. Those targets attempt to capture how well care is being provided. The different CCOs across the state get to come up with their own plans for how to provide the care.

The hope is it will improve health care quality and access and also hold down cost increases. The anticipated savings for the state play an important role in Gov. John Kitzhaber’s budget plans.

But the public could very well be shut out when critical decisions are made about the community’s health. The rules that describe how CCOs must operate do not declare that they have to follow Oregon’s open meetings laws.

Of course, the state doesn’t just hand CCOs piles of money and wish them well. It does monitor them. It does require reports.

Central Oregonians can actually count themselves lucky. The Central Oregon Health Council is the local regulatory body that oversees Central Oregon’s CCO. It has made almost all of its meetings public.

That is not how most CCOs in Oregon operate, though. And the Central Oregon Health Council is under absolutely no requirement to continue to keep most of its meetings open.

Remember, CCOs are spending public money. They do the public’s business. They provide public health care. They make decisions about what gets done to improve health and what does not.

Oregon’s public meetings laws are not so unforgiving that medical providers would have to tell all or reveal individual patient information. Oregon’s laws have provisions enabling governing bodies to hold executive sessions to safeguard sensitive information.

We have no reason to believe that CCOs across Oregon are doing anything magnificently awful. Everything the state tells Oregonians is that CCOs are wondrous examples of how to improve health and save money. And that they should be expanded to cover more people.

They should not be expanded without transparency. Secret government is not better government.