Don’t Let Medicare Benefits Go to Waste! Here’s How to Use Every Dollar of Your OTC Card This Year
Millions of Medicare members lose their OTC funds yearly. Learn what to buy before it's too late
According to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA), 30 percent of Medicare users won’t use their Medicare Advantage over-the-counter (OTC) funds by the end of the year. This could result in $5 billion worth of unused benefits, something that can be avoided if beneficiaries find ways to put their funds toward things like vitamins, COVID-19 tests and more. To learn more about how to make sure your benefits don’t go to waste, keep scrolling!
What to know about Medicare benefits
Medicare Advantage (MA) users have access to something called OTC benefits, which is a prepaid card that allows users to purchase over-the-counter health and wellness products at places like CVS, Walgreens, Dollar General, Walmart, Target and more.
On average, the card has $100 loaded on it every quarter, all of which must be used by the end of the year.
In 2025 specifically, there will be around $5 billion in unused OTC benefits, something that can be avoided so long as MA users spend their remaining money effectively and helpfully.
To help learn ways to do that, Lucas Berenbrok, an associate professor of pharmacy and therapeutics at the University of Pittsburgh, told Newsweek, “Tools like online catalogs and mobile applications can help consumers understand what items may be covered, although members should check with their plan for an up-to-date list of eligible items.”
He also recommends beneficiaries “check with their plan to determine whether specific purchases are covered—eligible items can be found on the plan’s website or in a mailed brochure.”
How to spend your over-the-counter Medicare benefits
If you are one of the people with leftover OTC Medicare benefits, Berenbrok recommends spending it on “non-prescription medications like canes, supports and braces, vitamins and minerals, denture care and COVID-19 tests.”
“Using an OTC benefit can help offset the out-of-pocket costs for these covered items,” he continued. “Community pharmacies are ideal places to buy OTC items because pharmacists are trained in self-care and can guide consumers on using non-prescription products safely and effectively. Talk with your neighborhood pharmacist before starting an OTC medication or product to better your health.”
Another option for OTC users is newly developed apps that help them discover how much money they have left to spend. They can also tell Americans what to spend it on and where certain items are available for purchase. Options include: OTC Network (also known as MyOTC) and Chapter OTC.
“We built this app to make the lives of our members easier, because, again, this is really material money for people, and it’s a benefit that is heavily marketed, but insurance carriers often try to make it difficult to use, because obviously they don’t want, they don’t want to spend the money sometimes,” Chapter OTC creator Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz said in a statement, per CW 34. “It’s billions of dollars that are available, and billions of dollars go unspent again, because these benefits are so difficult for people to actually take advantage of, and so our job is to advocate for consumers and make it really easy for people to get the benefits that, frankly, they’ve purchased.”
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