Emphasizing the value of OTC medicines

Is this the year that restrictions on the use of over-the-counter medicines in conjunction with a flexible savings account are lifted? If you consider the value proposition — the $102 billion saved each year by the use of OTC medicines — and that health care is moving toward a more value-based, outcomes-driven system, it would certainly seem so.

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“The FSA issue continues to be one of our top priorities if not our top priority from a legislative perspective,” Scott Melville, president and CEO for the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, told Drug Store News. “Ever since that law was enacted in 2011, [and] the ability for consumers to use their FSAs or HSAs to purchase OTC medicines was taken away, we pursued a strategy up on Capitol Hill to change that and to correct that wrong. Each year since then, we’ve had bipartisan and bicameral legislation introduced to reverse that provision,” he said. “When I speak to legislators on the Hill, uniformly they say, ‘That makes no sense.’ ... We’re hopeful that with two years left in the president’s administration and a Congress that is likely to start moving legislation and sending it to him, that this will be at the top of the list for the kind of common sense reforms that President Obama has said that he’d be willing to consider.”



And “this makes absolutely no sense” is exactly what Sen. Erik Paulsen, R-Minn., said to fellow senators in introducing The Family Health Care Flexibility Act in March. “Instead of a top-down, one-size-fits-all healthcare system, we need solutions that provide patients with greater value, more choices and lower cost.”



“Families [today] have to waste more time and money jumping through Washington-mandated hoops just to access these accounts,” added Sen. John Barrasso, R-Minn. “We should be making it easier for families to pay for routine medical expenses, not harder.”



Emphasizing the value of OTC medicines is important because it represents the first line of healthcare defense for so many Americans. According to a Pfizer white paper released last year, as many as 81% of adults use OTC medicines as a first response to minor ailments. And one U.S. study analyzing the seven most common acute and chronic self-treatable conditions found that 92% of those who use OTC medicines in a given year would seek treatment elsewhere if OTCs were not available, which would result in a surge of office visits that would require 56,000 additional full-time healthcare practitioners to handle.



To that end, physicians recognize the value of OTC medicines, too. In a 2013 survey of U.S. primary care physicians, 75% would recommend an OTC product prior to prescribing a medicine to relieve their patients’ symptoms for ailments, such as allergies, pain, cough and cold, and acid reflux/upset stomach.



“[OTCs are] poised to play an even greater role in our nation’s evolving healthcare system as it continues to move toward a more value-based system, where incentives are changing with consumers being required to absorb more cost of their health care,” Melville said. “For every dollar a consumer spends on an OTC medicine, it saves the healthcare system $6 to $7 for a total of about $102 billion each year by avoiding unnecessary doctor appointments or by using less-expensive OTC medicines when it’s appropriate.”