Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spoke outside of Hardin Memorial Hospital in Elizabethtown, Kentucky yesterday where he claimed that Obamacare is the biggest issue for the economy during this election cycle and that Obamacare is what's hurting the economy.
ELIZABETHTOWN, Ky (WHAS11) -- In his first Kentucky comments since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that even if "Obamacare" is repealed, the health care law will not easily go away.
"If you thought it was a good idea for the federal government to go in this direction, I'd say the odds are still on your side," McConnell told workers at Hardin Memorial Hospital, "because it's a lot harder to undo something than it is to stop it in the first place." [...]
"I don't think there is any bigger issue in the fall election except for the general effect of the economy," McConnell said to several reporters after the hospital appearance, "which this has contributed to making so poor."
The majority of the law will not come into effect until 2014, but according to Mitch McConnell, it's hurting the economy right now!
This is a lie, and let me tell you something else about the location he spoke at.
I was born in Hardin Memorial Hospital, and I'm very familiar with the economic situation in this community where Mitch McConnell claimed Obamacare was the "biggest issue."
Elizabethtown is a low-income community with a mix of poor and eldery residents who depend on Medicaid and Medicare. Most of the local citizens who are not poor or elderly are military personnel who go to Fort Knox for medical treatment. Those who are neither poor, elderly, service members or veterans typically go to Louisville, the state's largest city, for medical treatment.
If it weren't for Medicaid and Medicare, Hardin Memorial Hospital would go out of business and everyone working there would lose their jobs. As a business and as a community, it will directly benefit from the Medicaid expansion included in Obamacare.
McConnell may be right that Obamacare is "the biggest issue" for the economy during this election, but not for the reasons he implies. If it's the "biggest issue" it's because the economy desperately needs it.
Fortunately for the state, even if he is a blue dog Kentucky's governor is a Democrat.