For the past several months, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has tried to have it both ways on Kynect, Kentucky's popular implementation of Obamacare that has delivered health insurance to more than 500,000 Kentuckians. On the one hand, McConnell has said he wants to repeal Obamacare, but on the other hand, he also says Kynect should remain in place if Kentucky wants to keep it.
There's no reasonable way to square those two positions—you can't repeal Obamacare without repealing Kynect, and you can't keep Kynect without keeping Obamacare—but that hasn't stopped McConnell from taking them both. His campaign seems to be perfectly aware of the fact that the two positions cannot be reconciled as evidenced by the fact that despite repeated attempts by Sam Stein of The Huffington Post to get them to clarify his position, they refused to respond:
The Huffington Post asked the McConnell campaign that very question the day after the debate. We asked the campaign the same question twice more that day. Then, we posed the question to them seven more times over the subsequent nine days. We also called the campaign twice. The campaign never responded.
But now McConnell's team has finally responded, albeit through his official Senate office:
A spokesman for the minority leader confirmed that he wants to repeal the full health care law, including not just the federal subsidies for people purchasing on exchanges like Kynect, but also the mandates and taxes on high-cost plans and other features of the legislation.
Keeping Kynect without keeping its subsidies would be like keeping Social Security without Social Security checks—it would be keeping it in name only. And with its statement to The Huffington Post, McConnell is now on record conceding that is what his position is.
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It was obvious all along that McConnell was full of it. And now we've got confirmation—from his own office, no less.