Huffington Magazine Issue 61 | Page 72

KENTUCKY’S KING world countries,” according to a March 2013 report from the Kentucky Department of Public Health. To try to address the needs of Kentucky residents, health care providers in the state have been forced to get creative. In Elkton, the Helping Hands Health Clinic is supported by twice-a-week bingo games put on by the staff, while in Danville, the Hope Clinic operates out of an old bank and serves six counties. Last July, a mobile clinic set up a triage on fairgrounds in Wise County, Va., which served many Kentucky residents who crossed over the state line. Stan Brock, the clinic’s founder, says that in a little more than two days, they saw 1,453 dental patients and pulled 3,467 teeth. “It filled several buckets,” he recalls. For years, McConnell responded to Kentucky’s poverty and health care crises by directing millions of dollars in federal earmarks to various projects in the state, constructing what has amounted to a lottery system. To get help, the plight of Kentuckians did not have to rise to a national scandal like the Paducah plant’s contaminated workers. Nor did it require the tint of a conservative cause. They just had to be very lucky. (Nobody has HUFFINGTON 08.11.13 emphasized just how lucky more than the senator himself. McConnell has greeted the recipients of his earmarked funds like winners of the Powerball jackpot, complete with giant novelty checks.) Earmarks have political benefits, and McConnell made a point of visiting remote counties to tout the federal money he had secured for his constituents. “I hate to call it passing out checks, but you know that’s kind of what it amounts to,” says David Cross, who served as chairman of the Clinton County Republican Party until 2012. Cross remains a McConnell-supporting Republican, and still lives in Clinton County, which has a population of about 10,000 on the state’s southern border. Cross says McConnell would visit Clinton “when there was some aspect of the federal government involved locally and Senator McConnell was involved and he wanted the local community to know he was involved.” McConnell was one of hundreds of politicians who benefited from making this kind of selective disclosure, since earmarks were essentially anonymous under congressional procedures for decades. New rules in 2008 required members of Congress to disclose their funding requests, and the practice was banned outright in 2011. A Huff-