Mitch earns his wooden noses

“Pardon me while I make up some stuff to help my campaign.”

Another day, another collection of Pinocchios for Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell from The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler. At issue: McConnell claimed that under Obamacare, four times as many Kentuckians had received insurance cancellation notices as had enrolled for coverage in Kynect, the state’s health insurance exchange.

As it turns out, McConnell’s claim was not only based on inaccurate numbers, but it also relied on comparing apples and oranges:

• McConnell claimed 280,000 people had received insurance cancellation notices, but the number he cited was not of people who had received cancellation notices, rather it was an estimate of the number of Kentuckians who could at some point receive a cancellation notice before the end of 2014.


• It turns out the 280,000 figure was too high. After taking into account which plans could be grandfathered and the Obama administration’s fix to extend plans, the state revised its estimate of people could receive cancellation notices by 40 percent to 168,000.


• More than half of these plans are in the small business market, which is not served by Kynect.

To recap: McConnell used a number that had already been reduced by 40 percent, claimed that it reflected the number of people who had already had their plans cancelled when it instead reflects the maximum number of plans that could be canceled by the end of the year, and ignored the fact that more than half of the plans weren’t part of the individual market that Kynect serves.

McConnell conveniently failed to mention that including both Kynect and Medicaid, 370,000 Kentuckians have enrolled in new coverage thanks to Obamacare, 75 percent of whom were previously uninsured. McConnell’s political problem is obvious: Overall, one in 12 Kentuckians now has health insurance because of Obamacare and he wants to repeal their coverage. That’s a losing proposition and short of flip-flopping on Obamacare repeal, his only hope is to create a false reality in which Obamacare is doing more harm than good.

Whether or not he succeeds in doing that may well determine his political fate, but one thing is clear: The facts are not on his side.

Daily Kos

Mitch earns his wooden noses