Steve Beshear and Mitch McConnell, two of the most powerful lawmakers in Kentucky, are at odds when it comes to Obamacare.

McConnell, on the one hand, describes the president's signature healthcare reform bill in near-apocalyptic terms, recently calling it a "catastrophic failure" that is "beyond fixing."

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"It needs to be pulled out root and branch and we need to start over. It's been a catastrophe for health care and for the economy at large," McConnell told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren on Wednesday.

But McConnell's home-state's governor, Steve Beshear, strongly disagrees. "I have a U.S. senator who keeps saying Kentuckians don't want this. Well, the facts don't prove that out," Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear told reporters on Thursday in Capitol Hill. "There is a tremendous pent-up demand in Kentucky for affordable health care," Beshear said. "People are hungry for it."

Indeed, Kentucky's exchange has been one of the most successful in the nation thus far, and in the wake of the federal exchange's much-documented early failures, has been seen by Obamacare's supporters as a model of how the program looks when it's working. According to Beshear, more than 550,000 people have visited Kentucky's Obamacare site since its Oct. 1 launch. More than 180,000 have called into the healthcare call center, meanwhile, and about 69,000 people — 41 percent of whom are under the age of 35 — have signed up.

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