Governor Pataki Says No To Viagra

Written by JDPGlobal | Friday, 27 January 2006

Some new rules will come into effect soon which will prove to annoying for pharmacies once the state budget proposal is released. The new policy will include a huge cut in many areas of medicine, which will make private medical institutions spend more than they are now.

Also implemented will be the state cuts for erectile dysfunction medicines. So no longer will people be able to buy the wonder Erectile Dysfunction drug Viagra with state money. The whole package of cuts will amount to a grand total of 1.3 billion dollars. This is so that the drugs used for ED can also be used to treat other health disorders too. The government has released figures that sixty thousand residents of New York make use of the state sponsored ED pills provided through Medicaid, the government sponsored programme. Under the new policy, almost fifteen million dollars will be saved by the state.

The extended savings that the state will have is the extra three hundred and six million dollars that would otherwise go in the funding of medical institutions under Medicaid. The previous year such a policy was not given a passage through the legislature. The industry feels that it will be a set back which will cost it up to a billion dollars in extra expenditure. The medical industry is waiting to see what good it will have for them as maybe there will be some light for the Medicare industry.

The new policy has upped the emergency room co-payment to a lesser income resident to twenty-five dollars from twenty-two dollars. The money to be kept aside to refund hospitals for treating poor patients has been unchanged. It remains eight hundred and forty million dollars. It is the opinion of the industry that the situation has gone from bad to worse instead of better.