Medicare illegally spent over $3 million on Viagra

The American company Medicare have reportedly spent three million dollars illegally on Viagra for the elderly and disabled it emerged yesterday.

Administrators have blamed the payouts in 2007 and 2008 on a computer software error and vowed to try to recover the money for private insurers. The spending breached a 2005 ban on erectile dysfunction drugs under the government health program.

In his report, George Reeb, acting deputy inspector general for audit services at the Department of Health, said Medicare 'should not have covered these drugs.' It paid out more than $3 million alone for Viagra tablets which had $1.9 billion sales in 2010, according to Bloomberg.

Medicare also paid an unknown amount for impotence drugs in 2009 and 2010, said the report.

Viagra

The payouts  were a fraction of Medicare's spending on drugs over the two-year period which came to $133 billion. Medicare’s administrators told the inspector general they would fix the mistake by updating computer databases with codes for the banned drugs.