In the American health care system, some patients are worth more money than others.
As cold and clinical as that may sound, it has long been the reality under a government-run Medicaid system that pays doctors less money to treat the poor than those same physicians receive for treating the elderly covered by Medicare or middle- and upper-income individuals who have private insurance.
Yet that could change - or at least begin to - under a little publicized aspect of Gov. Jay Nixon's plan to expand Medicaid eligibility in Missouri.
Nixon outlined a budget plan this past week that seeks to spend $908 million of new federal money to add nearly 260,000 lower-income adults to the Medicaid rolls under the provisions of President Barack Obama's health care law. Figures provided to The Associated Press by Nixon's budget office show that nearly $82 million of that money is the result of a proposal to increase the reimbursement rates for medical providers who treat those newly added patients.