Your tax dollars are going to buy penis pumps for old dudes

The Congessional supercommittee was brought together in the hopes that bureaucrats could come up with some way to trim the nation’s budget and pay down the deficit without forcing us to forgo such national governmental services as whatever program it is that studies owl vomit in Washington.

As ridiculous as this notion is – the last time we let two parties decide on an outcome, they proposed the indefinite detention of American citizens accused of crimes against the state and accidentally repealed a law preventing you from having sex with a sheep – we put our faith in said supercommittee, like a blind person following the smell of bacon into an abandoned warehouse. It ended as expected. Obviously, Congress couldn’t find a single unnecessary program to cut. Everything they considered, should they abandon it, would bring America to the brink of the apocalypse.

Including, apparently, this program that, over the last ten years, has given old men a quarter billion dollars over the last decade, just so they didn’t have to stuff a zucchini down their pants before Bingo Night.

According to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has spent more than $240 million of taxpayer money on penis pumps for elderly men over the past decade, and will surpass a quarter of a billion dollars this year for costs since 2001.

The cost to taxpayers for the pumps more than quadrupled during that period, from a low of $11 million in 2001 to a high of more than $47 million in 2010. And these represent only the costs for external devices, technically classified as “Male Vacuum Erection Systems,” not implantable devices or oral drugs such as Viagra.

Did you get that? Our government, which couldn’t find a single taxpayer funded program we couldn’t live without, subsequently cut a huge check to a bunch of dudes who feel their penises are too small. Dudes on Medicare. Because, goddam it, if they aren’t entitled to giant junk just for paying into the system for fifty years. But don’t touch the program because, if you do, seniors are going to be thrown off cliffs in droves or something.

Shockingly, this opened the door for Medicare fraud. One Illinois man (because, why not?) made $2 million from the government by buying adult toys on the Internet, repackaging them and selling them to “needy” seniors at a 1000% markup. The government, for it’s part, went years without discovering – or even inquiring – into why Illinois had so many horny geriatrics. It just went along with it. And still, when Medicare reform was proposed as a way of balancing the budget, it was quickly dismissed.

Huh.

It does sort of put that Congressional bestiality thing into perspective, though.