Medicare cuts on erection aids would save $444 million

Congress is poised to prohibit Medicare from spending an estimated $444 million for vacuum pumps used to treat erectile dysfunction in the next decade, a cost-saving move that might frustrate people who can’t afford drugs such as Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra.

Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit, created in 2003, generally isn’t permitted to cover Viagra or other erectile-dysfunction drugs. A bill under consideration by Congress would put a similar ban on the pump devices some people use as an alternative. Medicare spent $172 million on the devices from 2006 to 2011, the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services found in a December 2013 report. The payments were "grossly excessive," the deputy inspector general, Gloria Jarmon, said at the time, because Medicare paid more than twice retail prices for the pumps. The bill, introduced by Rep. Ander Crenshaw, a Florida Republican, has 380 sponsors.

Bloomberg News