Amanda Prestigiacomo

Yeah, so I was able to speak to FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty McCary, and he reassured me that there will still be safeguards on drugs that need them.

This is going to apply to the many drugs that could be safely accessed over the counter but currently aren't.

The goals here are to lower health care prices by cutting out middlemen and to just make it simpler to get the medications you need.

McCary said the initiative is a common-sense reform that's long overdue and it addresses an archaic system, that prescription-only system, that he said is simply not working.

As for implementation, there's going to be a process where companies can apply their drugs and they can be tested against certain criteria to earn this over-the-counter status.

The FDA is working to finalize these criteria, but McCary said that drugs that will qualify will be safe, they'll have no abuse potential, they can't be used in some nefarious way, and they won't require ongoing laboratory testing.

The commissioner noted that some obvious drugs that could fit the bill here would be naloxone, commonly referred to as Narcan, and anti-nausea drugs.

Yeah.

So currently, true costs are hidden with this PBM model.

Dr. McCary explained that cutting out PBMs or pharmacy benefit managers, they're the middlemen that run the prescription drug benefit for health insurance plans.

This is going to make the whole system less wasteful.

Right.

So the FDA wants to amp up the food packaging standards for maximum transparency when it comes to gluten.

They want labels to be clear and in plain English.

The goal here is obviously to make life easier for people who have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity, which includes millions of Americans.

Now, to that point, I asked McCary why there are so many Americans with gluten intolerances.

This seems to have spiked significantly when I was growing up.

Here's what McCary told me.

Well, we know that Preddy was armed while he was interacting with law enforcement and that he had magazines with ammo on him.

It is unclear, however, if he had ever brandished that weapon.