Today, President Barack Obama sent Congress his proposal for reining in over-the-counter medications, including restrictions on municipalities and small investors seeking to trade in the drug industry which is worth over $592 millon.

The proposal includes a provision to better protect small businesses and unsophisticated investors by limiting their eligibility to trade O.T.C. derivatives. Obama’s new proposal parallels previous legislative outlines by asking Congress to impose higher capital and margin requirements, move most derivatives to regulated exchanges, and impose supervision over all dealers.

The plan is part of a wider overhaul of financial industry rules intended to prevent a repeat of events last year, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers froze credit markets, worsened the recession and increased losses for state and local governments.

The idea is to “encourage substantially greater use of standardized O.T.C. derivatives, and thereby to facilitate substantial migration of O.T.C. derivatives onto central clearinghouses and exchanges,” said US Treasury secretary Timothy F. Geithner to House lawmakers at a hearing last month.