Medicare Has Shelled Out Nearly A Quarter Of A Billion Dollars On Penis Pumps
Your tax dollars, hard at work:
(Heartlander) — According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has spent more than $240 million of taxpayer money on penis pumps for elderly men over the past decade, and will surpass a quarter of a billion dollars this year for costs since 2001.
The cost to taxpayers for the pumps more than quadrupled during that period, from a low of $11 million in 2001 to a high of more than $47 million in 2010. And these represent only the costs for external devices, technically classified as “Male Vacuum Erection Systems,” not implantable devices or oral drugs such as Viagra.
In order to obtain a pump, according to CMS’s Local Coverage Determination (LCD) revised in October this year, the “patient’s medical record must contain sufficient documentation of the patient’s medical condition to substantiate the necessity for the type and quantity of items ordered,” noting erectile dysfunction (ED) can “commonly occur in men in the Medicare age group.”
This is what happens when we start operating not as a society as individuals but as a collective. You get stuck paying for other people’s penis pumps.
Maybe this is an effective treatment, I don’t know, but with Medicare going broke and the federal treasury empty, this hardly seems like an area where we should be spending money.
Tags: medicare, national debt
