MISMANAGED CARE Imperious manner remains steady at Blue Cross BY BRIAN C. JONES

So how is the search coming for a replacement for Ronald A. Battista — the resigned president of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island?

"No update," said Megg Regner, director of public relations, said recently when I asked the question.

I asked again.

There is an "ongoing search being conducted. That’s all I have for you," Regner said.

Is there a target date?

"I could say ‘no’ a couple of different ways," Regner said. "We have no update."

This none-of-your business approach to a simple question is not a good sign for those who hope that the giant health insurance company, which holds about 70 percent of the Rhode Island market, is really on a road to reform.

This is not because you’d expect the answer to be very detailed, or even interesting, at this point in the search for a new president. By their very nature, searches for big-league executives go on behind closed doors — unless the process breaks down and insiders start leaking preliminary results because they have some personal agenda, like derailing the process.

But what you expect from a company that’s trying to be helpful are some neutral details, such as the name of the over-priced headhunting consultant hired to help with the search. Or the details of a subcommittee of the board of directors in charge of the process. Or that a certain number of candidates has applied so far. That interviews already have begun. That the company hopes to wrap things up soon, etc., etc.

You’d especially expect this semi-transparent approach with Blue Cross, because the technically nonprofit company has been under fire for nearly a year as an arrogant monopoly whose secretive and heavy-handed operation has burdened the state with high premiums and inadequate payments to doctors and hospitals. Critics fault it for straying far from its mission as a simple bill-payer by trying to become the self-appointed regulator of the state’s medical care system.

The search for a new president is an especially sensitive subject, since Battista was hounded out of office by critics including the state’s doctors, Governor Donald L. Carcieri, and many General Assembly members, who spent a good deal of this past legislative session coming up with new laws to reform the way Blue Cross is governed and regulated.

Battista was first fingered as a troubled executive when the Phoenix’s Steven Stycos wrote a comprehensive profile of Blue Cross last October, describing how Battista was so stuck-up he wouldn’t show up for a meeting on statewide health-care issues organized by US Representative Patrick J. Kennedy. Stycos also described an apparent insider $600,000 loan by Blue Cross to the already well-paid ($579,000) Battista.

Things heated up when Providence Journal reporters Mike Stanton and Tracy Breton disclosed that Blue Cross had forgiven the loan to help Battista pay for a divorce and new house. If there were any doubts about this unsavory approach to "business," the day after Battista resigned May 7, Stanton wrote that Battista and his family for years had been getting free acupuncture treatments from a doctor who hoped Battista and Blue Cross might expand stingy coverage for patients seeking the same treatment.

So the public has more than a passing interest in how the search for a replacement president is going, and the Blue Cross line, when the Phoenix went to press, that "we have no update" isn’t quite what the doctor’s ordered.