Matt Blunt Knocks Off the Disadvantaged

Within this story, we find out that Missouri's governor operates hit squads:

However, critics of the proposed Medicaid reimbursement rate increase say it's more important to help people who lack any kind of insurance, especially after legislation backed by Republican legislators and Gov. Matt Blunt knocked about 90,000 people off...

Well, some would imply that's what actually happened, here's what the paper really reports:

However, critics of the proposed Medicaid reimbursement rate increase say it's more important to help people who lack any kind of insurance, especially after legislation backed by Republican legislators and Gov. Matt Blunt knocked about 90,000 people off the Medicaid rolls this year.

This particular piece offers the soapbox to doctors who want more money from the state's till and those who support Medicaid and want the doctors to have more money from the till and want more people on the Medicaid rolls.

Lost amid the din, we can almost imagine the sound of common sense: that doctors who weren't losing money on the substandard Medicaid reimbursement for services wouldn't have to raise those standard prices on everyone else to cover the Medicaid shortage and the costs of accommodating bureaucratic paperwork and eager-to-earn whistleblowers looking for a score on a receptionist's misplaced decimal point (which is Medicaid fraud, don't you know, and whomever fingers a doctor for it gets a percentage of the proceeds).

Sorry, I exaggerate; there's no tinkling of common sense in the registers only dogs can hear contained within this story, and no sympathy for a fiscal conservative governor.