Grimes campaign slams McConnell

Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes’s campaign is knocking Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for declaring that the state’s healthcare exchange isn’t connected to ObamaCare.

{mosads}”Mitch McConnell has been in the fantasyland that is Washington for so long that he cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction. McConnell has voted to destroy Kynect – and he has said he will do it again. In the U.S. Senate, Alison Lundergan Grimes will fix the law to ensure it is working for all Kentuckians,” Grimes’s senior adviser, Jonathan Hurst, said in a statement.

It’s the campaign’s first response to McConnell’s comments, made last Friday at a press conference, that his push for repeal of the healthcare law had nothing to do with Kynect, the state’s healthcare exchange, which has been lauded as one of the most successful in the nation.

According to The Associated Press, when asked if a repeal of the healthcare law would mean the state’s exchange would be dismantled, McConnell said: “I think that’s unconnected to my comments about the overall question.”

His campaign went on to double-down on those comments, with spokeswoman Allison Moore saying earlier this week in a statement that “if Obamacare is repealed, Kentucky should decide for itself whether to keep Kynect or set up a different marketplace.”

Democrats have pointed out that because Kynect was established and funded by the federal healthcare law, it’s unclear how the state would maintain it if the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were repealed.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D) hit similar notes to Grimes’s campaign in a statement out earlier this week.

“Eliminating ACA means that folks with pre-existing conditions will struggle to find coverage,” he said in a statement released by the Kentucky Democratic Party.  “Young adults won’t be able to stay on their parents’ coverage, women won’t be treated equally by insurers and federal subsidies for Kentuckians will end. Senator McConnell either doesn’t understand what the ACA is, or is just trying to mislead Kentucky families for his political benefit at their expense.”