Health Care Funding: Should Junk Food and Sodas Be Taxed?
Health care reform in America has been for a long time facing a funding crisis. Lawmakers have therefore recently come up with a new means of acquiring funds to pay for health care. This involves the taxation of sodas at 3 cents in order to raise an additional $24 billion over the coming four years. Read more about Opportunities and Key Players in Clinical Nutrition: The Market for Enteral, Parenteral and Infant Nutrition in the US and EU
This new taxation on sodas could be a great idea to inject cash needed for health care reform, seeing as sodas are one of the leading causes of health complications such as bone erosion, diabetes and obesity. However, the problem with this new plan to tax sodas in order to pay for health care reform is that it seems to be a rather regressive tax whose ultimate target will mainly include low-income earners and persons of low-education, who feature as the main demographic that consumes sodas. What this means is that the people who will end up paying for health care reform are exactly the same people who simply cannot afford it.
Moreover, critics feel that if the government is determined to change the behavior of consumers by taxing sodas to pay for health care reform, it would be best to first stop all government subsidies on sugar. These subsidies have been in existence since World War II. The fact that these subsidies are still in place render the governments move to tax sodas in order to pay for health care reform redundant. This is because; it’s noteworthy that white sugar is another leading contributor to health complications in the US.
Critics are also skeptical about whether the health care funds emanating from soda taxation, will actually reach those who could really benefit from health care reform, or whether they will simply be lost in the prevalent bureaucracies on Capitol Hill. An example of this is the government settlement with Big Tobacco, which money was supposed to go into health care reform across the US, but instead ended up in federal budgets for use in other areas not related to health care. As such, critics of this new taxation on sodas to fund health care reform argue that the taxes accruing from this plan will similarly be lost to purposes other than health care reform.
Critics are of the opinion that instead of knee-jerk reactions such as slapping sin taxes on those who can’t afford it, the government should focus on educating consumers on the harmful nature of the products they consume.
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