In the first and likely only Kentucky Senate debate, Mitch McConnell continued to offer his nonsensical word salad when it comes to Obamacare and his state’s implementation of it, Kynect. Calling Kynect, just “a website,” McConnell reiterated his position that Obamacare should be repealed.
“Kentucky Kynect is a website. It was paid for by a two-hundred-and-some-odd-million-dollar grant from the federal government. The website can continue but in my view the best interests of the country would be achieved by pulling out ObamaCare root and branch,” McConnell said in a debate with Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate for Senate.
How generous of him to allow the website to continue. The problem, as McConnell well knows but refuses to acknowledge, is that the program is not just a website. Without the federal law, there is no Medicaid expansion and there is no funding for subsidies to help people purchase insurance. And there are 520,000 Kentuckians who would lose their coverage if McConnell had his way, which Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes was quick to point out, saying she’d “stand up for half a million Kentuckians” who have insurance for the first time. She blasted McConnell as being in a “fictional fantasy land” on the issue.
As if to prove that, McConnell actually disputed those enrollment numbers, not based on any facts, but by arguing that Kynect coverage was somehow inadequate and low-quality. The debate moderator pushed McConnell to answer on Kynect for nearly five minutes, according to news reports, without McConnell answering how exactly the state’s popular health program could continue without the federal law underpinning it.
Voting by mail is convenient, easy, and defeats the best of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts. Sign up here to check eligibility and vote by mail, then get your friends, family, and coworkers to sign up as well.
If McConnell does become majority leader of the Senate, there’s not much question what he’s going to be focusing his efforts on—wasting more time on Obamacare repeal votes. But unlike his House counterparts, who at least pretend like they’re going to come up with something to replace the law, McConnell is offering nothing.
