Medicare Pays $188 Million for Penis Pumps
So, you thought that Medicare was designed to help granny and gramps to avoid hardship in their old age. Well, you have too narrow a definition of hardship.
They don’t want less hardship. They want more hardship. And Uncle Sam provides it.
That $188 million bought 500,000 pumps. Think of the joy that brought to the shuffleboard centers of America.
Medicare pays for penis pumps as durable medical equipment — the same as it does for wheelchairs, home oxygen and bedpans — as long as a physician prescribes the device as “medically necessary” for treatment of erectile dysfunction. Over a decade, the average cost for the pumps has been about $338.
According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, annual spending on the pumps has gone up from $7.2 million in 2000 to more than $36 million last year.
You just can’t keep good men down.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Congress in 2005 ended Medicaid subsidies for ED drugs starting in 2006, and for Medicare patients the following year. Most private insurers followed Medicare’s lead.The move resurrected the vacuum-pump industry, which had been making them as medical devices, as opposed to sex novelties, since scientific studies had proved them effective in the 1980's. . . .
Not coincidentally, Medicare claims for the pumps actually declined in 2003 and 2004 when the medications were covered, but have steadily increased every year since. By 2010, Medicare paid for nearly 98,000 of the devices.
Government welfare programs work this way. At the beginning, they are adopted to help the needy. Over time, they help the manufacturers that say they are helping the needy.
The programs grow and grow.
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Published on July 13, 2012. The original is here.