Hitting Two Birds with One Stone

By: Jude Sulit

A bill that can build better hospitals and at the same time provide and ensure premium health care for the poor is a total package, isn’t it?

The Department of Health, with the Philippine College of Physicians, New Vois Association of the Philippines (NVAP) and other health advocates urged lawmakers to consider Senate Bill 3249 not only as a revenue bill but more importantly as a health bill.

The measure, otherwise known as the Sin Tax Bill, seeks to raise revenue for tight government budgets by imposing, usually, high excise taxes on cigarettes, liquor and so on. But according to DOH, the measure, if passed, does not only limit itself from continuous generation of revenues, it deters Filipinos especially the youth and the poor from smoking and drinking alcohol and protects them from lifetime consequences of smoking and alcohol abuse.

While this legislative proposal intends to encourage smokers to hold off from this vice and prevent young from engaging, the bill, as it produces national income, also sets sights on financing universal health care program to improve accessibility to quality health care.

“We have a win-win solution here. By taxing tobacco we can generate revenue for universal health care. At the same time, by increasing the price of tobacco to a point where youth and children cannot afford it, we are preventing young people from taking up this deadly habit,” DOH Secretary Ted Herbosa said in a news report.

Herbosa also believes that the bill is anti-cancer, particularly lung cancer, commonly acquired by heavy smokers as the products contain 70 carcinogens or cancer-causing substances.

Emerson Rojas, a constant supporter of the bill and the President of NVAP, an organization composed of speech-impaired people, said that his heavy tobacco consumption before caused him to suffer Stage 4 laryngal cancer. His voice is now sustained by a device called electrolarynx.

“The Philippines has the cheapest prices of cigarettes in the Western Pacific Region,” he lamented. He also added that the passage of the bill will encourage more adult smokers to quit smoking and also discourage the start of young smokers.

On the other side of the coin, though the measure posed a threat to the poor’s mean of living, DOH assured that aside from preventing diseases credited to smoking, it is also pro-poor as well.

“As the tobacco industry targets the poor in marketing their products, it will also be the poor who will benefit from the sin tax as money collected from the industry will be used to enroll millions of poor families into socialized healthcare and for the improvement of the whole healthcare service delivery,” said Herbosa.

According to the 2012 survey of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, the poorest of the poor dominated the total number of heavy smokers in the country with 40 percent and 36 percent belonging to the lowest and the second lowest quintile respectively.

It can be found ironic that the rich who can spare a lot of money on the vice occupies only the 25 percent.

“This means that of the 17.3 million adult smokers in the country, 76 percent of them are poor. This also reinforces previous studies that the poor spend more money on cigarettes than on education and health,” he said.

The health secretary said that as the poor, without enough knowledge of the harmful consequences of tobacco consumption, are more susceptible to all “diseases and economic burden attributed to smoking.”

“We have a turn the tide and make the tobacco industry pay for the health and economic burdens that smoking brings. By taxing tobacco we will be able to enroll a total of 10.9 million poor families into the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) and increase catastrophic benefits from 10 percent to 30 percent of the total cost.”