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Americans may soon be able to get cholesterol-lowering medications and other widely used prescription drugs without seeing a doctor, a first step in what could amount to sweeping changes to how patients access treatments for chronic conditions.
The Food and Drug Administration in a draft guideline on Tuesday outlined how such a status, which the agency said could help lower health-care costs, would work. Patients could answer questions on a mobile-phone app to help determine whether they should be able to access a medication without a prescription.
"Our hope is that the steps we're taking to advance this new, more modern framework will contribute to lower costs for our health care system overall and provide greater efficiency and empowerment for consumers by increasing the availability of certain products that would otherwise be available only by prescription," FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement.
Order your drugs from a smartphone app.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @09:34AM (1 child)
Usually this is done to when insurance companies want to get expensive drugs officially 'over the counter', which means that insurance companies then no longer need to cover them under their 'prescription drug plans', the patient now has to pay out of pocket.
I.e. this is cost shifting to the consumer.
Which lobbyists are pushing for this proposal? Follow the money..
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:04PM
This is exactly what I was going to say. Insurance companies pushed acid reducers like Zantac and Nexium OTC because now they don't have to pay for them. The price has come down since, thanks generics, but when they first went out it was crazy expensive.