MEDICARE AND VIAGRA

Government health programs require states to pay for men's erections. I'm all for men having good sex lives, but why would government subsidize that? Because our bloated government just cannot stop vomiting out the money. For years Medicaid has been spending millions of dollars on Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs. The Clinton administration told states they had to pay, because the law requires that Medicaid pay for any FDA-approved drug deemed medically necessary. Bush administration officials kept the policy. They wouldn't agree to a television interview about it.

Doctors are so addicted to government funding that even insane and embarrassing subsidies are passionately defended. "Erectile dysfunction is not fun, it's a disease," said Dr. Steven Lamb, who appears often on ABC. "It needs to be treated. It needs to be paid for."

I gave him a hard time about it. "Sex is a government entitlement now? Do you ever think about budgeting? What the taxpayer pays?" "What we're trained in is to be your advocate," he said. "I do not take costs into account."

Of course not. Government-funded medical programs invite doctors to declare endless "needs" -- knowing someone else will bear the cost.

Eventually there was outrage. Sadly, not merely because people woke up and realized that government shouldn't fund Viagra. No, only when money was needed for Hurricane Katrina relief and it was revealed that the government was giving Viagra to child molesters did Congress allow Medicare and Medicaid to stop paying for erections. Congress allowed states to stop. But some states still pay.

More here





Permissive doctor regulation rejected by Australian professionals

Surgeons insist that a trainee neurosurgeon will never operate again despite a medical board clearing the way for his return to medicine next year after being convicted on child pornography charges. A Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria inquiry into Abraham Stephanopoulos found his proclivity for downloading and storing "large amounts of child pornography" - including images of children between the ages of four and seven - did not make him a pedophile.

The 31-year-old doctor was suspended from practice for being caught with having 1400 pictures at his home, in his car, and on computers at Monash Medical Centre, in Melbourne's southeast, of naked children. The board said he would be able to return to medicine in March next year, but that he would be banned from treating patients younger than 18 for the following eight years.

But the Victorian president of the Australian Medical Association, Mark Yates, attacked the board's decision yesterday, saying it would bring the medical profession's image into further disrepute. "The board is there to protect the public, it says, but it's not there to maintain the good standing of the profession necessarily," he told The Australian. "Clearly this person has acted in an unethical way, has brought the profession considerable discredit."

Dr Stephanopoulos received a five-month suspended jail sentence in July last year on three charges of knowingly possessing child pornography between 2000 and 2003. A spokeswoman for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons said the 31-year-old would not be able to practice surgery in Australia again. "He's been dismissed from our training program," she said.

Dr Stephanopoulos justified his obsession with child pornography as an avenue for coping with a heavy workload, the medical board said in the 44-page report of its inquiry, published on its website on Wednesday. It found his reason for saving the downloaded pornographic images onto his computer was because it was "exceptionally easy - just one mouse-click". "He emphatically denied that he has an attraction to children," the board inquiry said. "He noted that he also saved images of adult males and made the point that he also had no attraction to them. "He emphatically denied receiving any sexual gratification from the illegal images which he viewed and downloaded onto the hard disc on the work computer." But the board ruled the misconduct was "abhorrent". "By his addiction to such material ... he provided encouragement to the producers and purveyors of illegal material that violates the innocence of children," it said. "As a consumer of their product, he has taken his place in the chain of their criminality."

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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