The question was how/why, not to simply restate it as fact wilit supporting data.
"If the argument is that getting a prescription is such a simple task it should cost almost nothing and be done instantly, then it likely doesn’t need to exist as a barrier at all."
That's not the argument. The argument is that the current system already meets the needs, so what real benefit does OTC provide? It's mostly a counterpoint to someone claiming that it's an overly complicated process. Even if it is cheap and fast, the benefit to an Rx is that someone reads the 6 or so questions off the Epic screen (or the user answers them on online) to ensure there are no interactions or elevated risks.
I'm not saying OTC is the wrong answer, but I'm not seeing any real arguments for real added net benefit from it.
Annual checkup, prescriptions only good for three months, and then typically only allowed to pickup one month dose at a time. That is a huge logistical burden being put on people. Maybe if a prescription was annual and included a year of pills, that would make the OTC case marginally less compelling. Given the status quo, OTC would be an improved quality of life for many.
You can't get a year of pills at one time. These pills expire 1 year from the manufacture date.
'"Likely" isn't enough here'
Why wouldn't it be - just because you say so? Keep in mind the alternative is that they make too much to qualify, which gives them other options.
Keep in mind your definition of unbanked is only about checking and savings accounts. It has nothing covering credit cards or prepaid cards, which are also options. So saying people are unbanked and would likely be burdened isn't enough.
It feels to me like there wasn't much investigation or thought involved in the overall process. They're just going to use the safety study from 1973 and a small nonprescription study to bring back a pill that was uneconomical for the company to sell as Rx. Seems a lot like the notorious 510k process they use for medical devices. So I'm not saying it's the wrong thing to do, but I'm skeptical of the benefits. They don't have any compelling reasoning to make me believe there will be a bet benefit when they fail to quantify several of the risks and only provide a comparative analysis with OTC only products of the potential failure rates without any impact analysis on the desired metric of unintended pregnancies.
That might not be a bad idea. In theory, a prescription means that a doctor who has an intimate knowledge of the patient's health works with the patient to make a carefully-considered mutual decision about medication.
In practice, much of the time the process is just a formality which imposes a huge time and financial cost on some patients as well as reducing the time the doctor has for patients who really need more attention. In the past, when access to information was more difficult, this might have been necessary.
In the modern world, a simple automated flowchart on a pharmacy website or in-store terminal can do as good a job selecting appropriate medications, avoiding drug interactions, screening for side effects, and informing patients how to take the drug correctly than a doctor. Of course, not every condition can be treated by merely dispensing pills, nor is this appropriate for medications that require more in-depth monitoring or have severe public health consequences.
Advertising drugs should probably be more restricted than it is now to put such a system in place.