Upon Senator Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) primary victory promise to repeal Obamacare, I mused who would ask him about kicking the 413,000 Kentuckians who were on Kynect off of it. Your mainstream media did just that, and the Kentucky Senator told a bold faced lie. A lie so disingenuous and so important policy wise that it can’t be overstated.
The man who is hoping to be Majority Leader of the Senate and who promised to repeal Obamacare if he makes it claimed that the Kentucky state exchange is not connected to Obamacare. But of course, it is. It is Obamacare, under a different name.
ABC reported:
But the veteran senator won’t say what would happen to the 413,000 Kentuckians who have health insurance through the state’s health care exchange.
McConnell told reporters Friday that the fate of the state exchange is unconnected to the federal health care law. Yet the exchange would not exist, if not for the law that created it.
Kynect is the state exchange version of the Affordable Care Act, aka, Obamacare. It’s a marketplace run by the state as the drafters of the ACA intended all marketplaces to be (before Republicans sabotaged the online marketplace by refusing to build the state markets).
A plurality of Kentuckians like their Obamacare, so long as it’s called Kynect, so it’s no wonder that McConnell is trying to dodge his way around kicking them all off of their health insurance.
According to Kynect statistics as of 4/21/14, 413,410 Kentuckians are enrolled in new health coverage, including Medicaid and private insurance.
Per the Kynect website, “Calling it ‘the single-most important decision in our lifetime for improving the health of Kentuckians,’ Gov. Steve Beshear announced in May 2013 the inclusion of 308,000 more Kentuckians in the federal Medicaid health insurance program.
Read slowly in honor of Mitch McConnell:
The expansion – made in accordance with the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) – will help hundreds of thousands of Kentucky families, dramatically improve the state’s health, create nearly 17,000 new jobs and have a $15.6 billion positive economic impact on the state between its beginning in Fiscal Year 2014 and full implementation in Fiscal Year 2021.
Kentuckians deserve to know what Mitch McConnell plans to do with all of the folks who signed up for insurance under Kynect or got onto Medicaid when he repeals Obamacare, as he has promised to try to do.
It looks like McConnell is caught in his own Obamacare trap. Too bad he and his party never tried to do anything to solve the healthcare crisis in this country — and have staked their entire party upon the public buying their smears about Obamacare — instead of realizing that once it was implemented, they would be running on kicking people off of insurance and that’s not as easy as telling Obamascare lies.
Kynect is Obamacare, and Senator McConnell knows it. This is one of the most brazen, outrageous lies told in the last few years, and I’m ranking it above even Mitt Romney’s Jeep lies, because it is meant to fool innocent Kentuckians who have no clue that Kynect is Obamacare. There aren’t words for this kind of cruel hypocrisy.
Politics is full of spin, but this goes beyond spin. This is a matter of people’s lives.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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