Medicare Is Grievously Overpaying for Penis Pumps
Perhaps you had assumed that penis pumps were merely novelty items, sold mostly by email spammers and in a few musty sex shops. If so, you might be interested to learn that they're actually considered a medical fallback option for men whose erectile dysfunction cannot be cured by drugs like Viagra—and that Medicare has been vastly overpaying for them for years.
So says a new report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General, descriptively titled: "Medicare Payments for Vacuum Erection Systems Are More Than Twice As Much As the Amounts Paid For the Same or Similar Devices By Non-Medicare Payers."
A "vacuum erection system," in case anybody's unclear, is just a penis pump. Between 2006 and 2011, Medicare spent a total of $172 million to purchase 473,620 such devices, at an average cost to the government of $360 each. The Veterans Administration, by comparison, pays just $185 per pump. With a little Google searching, the OIG found options available for an average of $164.
<snip>
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/medicare-is-grievously-overpaying-for-penis-pumps/283042/
= new reply since forum marked as read
