DoH should focus on health, not economics
Credit to Author: THE MANILA TIMES| Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2019 16:13:12 +0000
EARLIER this week, lawmakers from both the House of Representatives and the Senate voiced their disapproval of a proposal by the Department of Health (DoH) to impose an additional tax on food with a high salt content, including snack food, instant noodles and dried fish products.
While acknowledging that the Health department’s rationale for supporting the “salt tax” was well-meaning, the legislators rejected the proposal as “anti-poor” and “silly.” The congressmen and senators who have expressed these views are correct.
The DoH wants to impose the tax because, according to its data and data from the World Health Organization (WHO), 68 percent of deaths among Filipinos are caused by non-communicable diseases such as cancer, heart disease and chronic respiratory diseases. High salt intake is a significant contributor to those kinds of health problems.
Thus, the “salt tax” is similar in form to other types of “sin taxes” imposed on sugary beverages, alcohol and tobacco. The concept behind sin taxes is that a punitive tax serves to discourage consumption of products that are harmful to one’s health, while at the same time generating revenues that can be used to fund public health programs to address the health problems caused by the harmful substance. For example, sin tax revenues collected from tobacco might be used to fund health programs to treat lung cancer, emphysema and smoking cessation.
The funding for these programs will decline over time as more people are discouraged from engaging in unhealthy habits, but ideally, so will the scale of the need of the corresponding public health programs. In a perfect world, the sin tax funding of the public health programs would disappear at the same time as the necessity for them.
Of course, as with nearly every tidy economic concept, the sin tax model never works perfectly. Revenues are leaked to other programs, and public health initiatives on things like alcohol and tobacco, despite being managed by medical professionals who ought to know better, never seem to take into consideration the creative lengths to which people will go to pursue their vices. Therefore, smart policy considers a sin tax just one of a variety of tools to meet public health and funding objectives, a worthwhile part of a solution, but on its own far from the best or only solution.
The reason that is acceptable is that sin taxes are applied to discretionary consumption. Things like alcohol, tobacco and sugary beverages do not meet basic human needs. Certainly, one can develop a “need” for alcohol or tobacco through addiction, but that can be cured and the former user can make a choice not to consume them again as they are not required for basic sustenance.
The situation is quite a bit different when it comes to some of the high salt-content products the DoH proposes to tax. Dried fish and instant noodles are certainly not healthy, but for a great many people without means to make more expensive but healthier choices, they do form a part — and for the poorest Filipinos, probably quite often a significant part — of their basic sustenance. A “salt tax” therefore would be a minor imposition on middle- and upper-class consumers who have the option to forswear tasty salty snacks and eat something other than dried fish and noodles for dinner, but a tremendous and perhaps unbearable economic burden on poor Filipinos with limited choices. This is primarily what the lawmakers have objected to, and we agree with them.
The DoH should stay in its lane, leave tax policy to the economic experts, and focus on its own area of responsibility. Other policymakers in the government, on the other hand, should try to work with the DoH to find ways to give poorer Filipinos better health choices, so that using a tool such as the “salt tax” does not impose an unavoidable burden on them. Naturally, this may be distasteful to those concerned, because cooperation among different agencies and the development of broader, long-term solutions are far more difficult than simply levying a tax. It will be more effective, however, because it will be addressing the root problem of food poverty, rather than penalizing it.