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The Free Beacon has a story about the rising cost of penis care today, exposing the government’s willy-nilly use of taxpayer monies to pay exorbitant prices for penis enlargers.
Taxpayers paid nearly $175 million for vacuum erection systems (VES), commonly known as “penis pumps,” from 2006 to 2011, according to an inspector general report released on Monday.
The federal government paid more than double the retail price for VES, the Department of Health and Human Services IG found. Medicare prices for the systems, the report said, “remain grossly excessive compared with the amounts that non-Medicare payers pay.”
Medicare paid 473,620 VES claims during calendar years 2006 through 2011, according to the IG report.
Health care policy experts said the revelations in the IG report are a troubling indication of what they describe as wasteful spending in federal health programs.
“The fact that taxpayers have spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the past decade on penis pumps via Medicare is obscene and insulting – even more so when you consider that this is an arena of Medicare expenditures rife with fraud and where the government doesn’t even bother to assess medical necessity,” said Ben Domenech, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute.
Wasteful government spending indeed. The Democrats continue to insist that there is nowhere in the budget to cut costs, yet every day we find out more ways in which taxpayer money is being spent irresponsibly.
The GAO and CMS have noted that revising the fee schedule would soften the blow to taxpayers by about $14.4 million a year, and to individual consumers as a whole by about $3.6 million. So far, this has not been done. And even if it were, it does not address the fact that this is a claims area rampant with fraud and abuse; especially since, as the Beacon reports, medical necessity is not even being evaluated. If that doesn’t get a rise out of you I don’t know what will.
Says Domenech, “This is a perfect example of what happens when government becomes the be all and end all of human existence – a system where everyone has a right to a taxpayer-funded penis pump.”
Talk about gratuitous.