ALBANY, N.Y. – Scores of convicted rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in New York have been getting Viagra paid by Medicaid for the last five years, the state’s comptroller said Sunday.
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 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.”
The problem is an unintended consequence of a 1998 directive from federal officials telling states that Medicaid prescription programs must include Viagra, according to Hevesi. 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.
U.N. figure calls U.S. ‘ungainly giant’
Secretary General Kofi Annan’s chief of staff Mark Malloch Brown on Sunday called the United States an “ungainly giant” that only plays by its own rules. “This ungainly giant of a nation that has led the world in advancing freedom, democracy and decency, cannot quite accept membership in the global neighborhood association, and the principle of all neighborhoods – that it must abide by others’ rules as well as its own,” Malloch Brown said at the commencement address to law students at Pace University in New York City.
California: 6-cent drop in gas prices
The average gasoline price nationwide for all grades tumbled 6 cents in two weeks, continuing a slide in pump prices that began last month, an industry analyst said Sunday in Camarillo. The most popular grade, self-serve regular, was priced at an average of $2.15 a gallon, while customers paid $2.25 for midgrade, said Trilby Lundberg, who publishes the semimonthly Lundberg Survey of 7,000 gas stations around the country. Premium averaged $2.35 a gallon for the period.
Florida: Girl buried, found alive
An 8-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted and buried in a container under rocks inside a trash bin was found alive Sunday by an officer searching a landfill, Lake Worth authorities said. The girl was taken to the hospital with minor injuries, police said. Police Sgt. Mike Hall was scouring the landfill for the girl Sunday morning when he looked inside the trash bin and saw a yellow recycling container with a lid on it. When he opened the lid, he “saw a bunch of rocks, a foot and a hand,” Sgt. Dan Boland said. Milagro Cunningham, 17, who had been staying at the house of the girl’s godmother, was charged as an adult, police said.
Man allegedly kidnaps, rapes girls
A man kidnapped two girls from their homes while their parents slept, took them to a construction site and raped them before sending them home, threatening to kill their families if they said anything, Port Charlotte authorities said Sunday. Erick Thomas Knapp Jr., 31, confessed to investigators that he kidnapped, bound and raped the girls, ages 13 and 7, in separate incidents, said sheriff’s Capt. Michael Savage. He said there may be more victims.
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