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-