The governor's statement is different from his press secretary's assertion last month that the governor "never contacted TennCare" about Ford's entreaty.

Ford approached Bredesen "ages ago" asking that OmniCare be granted a bigger share of the state's 1.3 million TennCare patients, Bredesen told reporters last month.

The governor could not say yesterday whether he had passed Ford's request on to Manny Martins, then the director of TennCare, but he suspects he did not.

"I have no memory of anything specifically that happened with them," he said. "When I get requests from legislators, sometimes I deep-six them, 'I heard you and so on.' And sometimes I will follow up …

"So I can't tell you that I didn't say to Manny Martins, 'John Ford was in here the other day,' something like this. I don't remember doing that, but if Manny Martins came back and said I did, I'd say, 'Yeah, that would have been a way in which I might have handled that kind of request.' "