New York, Your Tax Dollars Hard At Work

This just gets put in the “WTF” category. Who is going to justify this one in the long line of social do-gooder programs? Is it bad enough that that medications like Viagra are covered at all by Medicaid while other services are denied or cut back on? Now we learn that convicted rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in New York have been getting Viagra paid by Medicaid for the last five years.

Audits by Comptroller Alan Hevesi’s office showed that between January 2000 and March 2005, 198 sex offenders in New York received Medicaid-reimbursed Viagra after their convictions. Those included crimes against children as young as 2 years old, he said.

Hevesi asked Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in a letter Sunday to “take immediate action to ensure that sex offenders do not receive erectile dysfunction medication paid for by taxpayers.”

We need to tell them to do this? Everyday we see a new Amber Alert of a missing child, a picture of a sexually molested child and view the funeral of a child murdered by a serial pedophile. All the while in states like NY, sex offender are receiving Viagra from tax payer’s dollars.

The two concerned NY Senators commented, “the problem should be corrected.” As The Moderate Voice pointed out, May we quote the great thinker Aristotle on that statement? “Duh.”

So it would appear that this little problem began in 1998. Who was the President? Who was the First Lady? And who wanted Government controlled Health care?

According to Hevesi, the problem is an unintended consequence of a 1998 directive from federal officials telling states that Medicaid prescription programs must include Viagra. His office discovered that the state was helping sex offenders pay for Viagra by checking Medicaid pharmacy expenditures against the state’s sex offender registry.

So just like every other mess that the Bush Administration has had to clean up from their predecessors, The Bush administration is scrambling to find a way to close a loophole that allows convicted rapists and other high-risk sex offenders to receive Viagra at taxpayer expense.

One really begins to wonder what purpose our government serves as it is obviously too large a bureaucracy to even understand what it does anymore or how to regulate itself. Tax dollars to pay for sex offender’s Viagra so that they can go out and commit more heinous crimes. One almost has to go out of their way to overlook this issue. Or is this an ACLU issue that sex offenders rights to Viagra will be violated? This repulsive story goes to the top of the list in the “WTF” Hall of Shame.

Update: Looks like someone else agrees, armageddonproject with “why we need smaller government”