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Governor Jay Nixon adamantly opposes a plan backed by the Missouri Senate to shift part of the tax burden from income to sales.

During a Jefferson City news conference to promote Medicaid expansion Thursday morning, Nixon told reporters the exchange of a 3/4-percent income tax cut for a half-cent sales tax increase would be especially harmful to seniors and veterans on fixed incomes, and could hurt working-class parents trying to provide for their children.

"They can talk about how some sort of scheme balances something for somebody else somewhere else...and somebody else gets somethin' else," Nixon said. "But the bottom line is, when folks go to the store, they'll be payin' more for everything they buy. That is a tax increase ...and I am not for it."

Nixon credited Republican lawmakers for giving what he called "constructive thought" to Medicaid expansion.

But he said he doesn't like language in a bill offered by Jefferson City representative Jay Barnes that would remove thousands of children and pregnant women from the Medicaid rolls by lowering their income eligibility thresholds.

"...it doesn't get to that 138-percent threshold which the federal government has said we gotta make it to," he said.

The Affordable Care Act provides billions of dollars in new health care subsidy money to states that expand medicaid to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.