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Viagra has no business on Medicare's approved drug list, critics
say
18 February 2005
Critics of a recent government decision to let Medicare to pay for Viagra
prescriptions next year say they just do not understand. When it
passed a Medicare reform law last year, Congress said, specifically,
that prescriptions for fertility drugs, weight-loss drugs, and barbiturates
are hardly ever medically necessary and should not be funded by
the government. The critics wonder why sexual performance enhancing
pills like Viagra would be any different.
Disappointingly, the decision to allow Medicare to pay for impotence drugs was not actively taken by a particular official or government department, as some reports last week seemed to imply.
In fact, the decision to allow Medicare to pay for Viagra,
Levitra and Cialis
for senior citizens was simply implicit in the original Medicare
drug benefit legislation passed in December 2003.
At that time, Congress removed nine classes of medicines from inclusion in the federal benefit, including fertility drugs, weight-loss drugs, non-prescription drugs and barbiturates.
All other drugs, if they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and if they are "medically necessary," can in theory be paid for by Medicare, and therefore by the federal government.
Clearly the phrase "medically necessary" is subjective: A drug is necessary if a doctor says so.
Yet because U.S. doctors are usually unaffected by the prices of the drugs they prescribe, they have little or no incentive not to prescribe something as necessary if the patient wants it.
Doctors, not drug companies, were responsible for the over-prescription of Vioxx and other painkillers that have been taken off the market.
Doctors, not the federal government, will be responsible if lots of taxpayer money winds up being spent on Viagra as well.
When the idea of a Medicare bill was first mooted, we had hoped that it would lead to a genuine reform, to a greater use of evidence-based medicine and ultimately to a reform of the wasteful health-care delivery system.
But a drug benefit was simply tacked onto the existing system.
As a result, taxpayers may wind up paying not only for Viagra but for a whole host of other expensive, and not always necessary, drugs. source:-http://www.newstarget.com | 
