In the UK there is a tax on sugary drinks so people pay more which is a good thing. Just shows if this tax is adopted how much of a nuisance certain companies are for the health and environment
What you are basically arguing is that government should either penalize poor people for making health choices they don't like, or limit the ability of poor people to make those choices by making it too expensive for them.
Why shouldn't government use a tax to influence health? Tax the things you don't want - tobacco, unhealthy food, carbon emissions and tax breaks on the things you do.
It worked very well cutting smoking in the UK, in tandem with advertising and shop display restrictions.
Unfortunately sin taxes are always regressive, and it's pretty easy to make the case that they mostly just punish the poor for their own circumstances. Sin taxes are rarely, if ever levied against the sins of society's upper crust.
> As of December, San Francisco has transitioned its SFpark pilot into a citywide program to set rates on all 28,000 parking spaces on public streets and 14 city-operated garages. The plan prices parking based on demand — not unlike the approach used by airlines to set fares or ride-hailing apps to set the price of a trip.
> “Demand-responsive pricing,” as the concept is known, means “prices could fluctuate block by block, time-band by time-band, and then weekday versus weekend,” said Hank Wilson, parking policy manager for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).
> The new approach to setting parking rates in San Francisco based on demand is not intended as an effort to raise parking revenue, officials stress. In fact, the new system will likely be revenue neutral because rates on many streets and in garages will likely drop.
Those sorts of sin taxes are the poster child for dumbly implemented tax policy. Tax the waste and pollution, or obesity and other health impacts that cause societal externalities. There's nothing wrong with drinking sugary water in moderation.
> "Not in countries with partially or fully-socialized healthcare."
Even in countries without, the public still end up paying the price in the end. Even if they don't see it manifest in their taxes, the social cost of cola manifests in other ways such as living in an environment where obesity is commonplace (aesthetic impact), having obese friends and family (particularly medical expenses in the family.) When obesity is commonplace, fit labor is in short supply which drives up the cost of everything. Public transit holds fewer people when massively obese cola drinkers are filling up more than one seat. Fewer people walk or cycle around town, opting instead to drive which results in worse traffic and worse air quality. The perceived importance of outdoor facilities like parks, hiking trails, etc all take a hit. All in all, obesity is bad for the economy, bad for the environment, and bad for the aesthetic qualities of society.
When the majority are physically fit, everybody benefits (even those who aren't fit.) When the majority are unfit, everybody is harmed (even those who are fit.)
This is the biggest corporate and right wing driver for opposing socialized medicine in the US. It isn't the free healthcare that is problem,because a rational corp would love to offload health care costs onto the worker, it is that it will completely upend the relationship between corporations and the government.
I can’t tell if you’re kidding, but this is a slippery slope that doesn’t end well, especially for addictive behavior. “Oh, you’re addicted to opioids? Sorry, no treatment for you. Maybe you should’ve been more responsible.”
It’s not the job of a doctor to pass moral judgement on you. They can recommend healthier habits, but doctors deciding whom to treat and whom not to treat based on some arbitrary moral judgement is really scary territory. It’s punitive and more importantly, it doesn’t work. Punishing people for their self-induced health problems doesn’t make them better, and it opens the door to some really scary discrimination.
If you don't do that you're on the other end of that slippery slope.
Should a chain smoker and someone with no elective risk factors have equal eligibility for a lung transplant? They're otherwise comparable patients. One's going to die, and there's only one lung to go around.
We seem to survive as a society by using systems like that for insurance that isn't health insurance. If your house burns down it matters if it was because of foreseeable and reckless behavior on your part.
Except it’s easy to prove negligence with a house fire, less so for medical problems. But those aren’t equivalent things. A fire is a one-off event, and if you don’t catch it right away, it runs its course and then it’s over. But how do you adequately paint a smoker as negligent? They’re certainly doing it to themselves, but they also have an addiction, propped up by companies and a society and probably a social group that supports them.
It’s obvious whether or not you’ve had a house fire, and it’s sometimes possible to divine who was at fault. But healthcare isn’t binary like that. Organ transplants are a special case too, and the ethics there are tricky because of limited resources. It also depends he wilt on compatibility. It doesn’t really matter if a smoker gets new lungs and a non-smoker doesn’t if the smoker is compatible with available lungs and the non-smoker isn’t.
Are you really responsible for your car accident record, or did you through no fault of your own develop an adrenaline addiction, propped up by auto commercials and a neighborhood that normalized street racing?
For any tax or public policy you can find sob stories on the edges, it doesn't mean it's not a good idea in the aggregate to enact the policy.
Which is what I'm pointing out in this case, it's generally a good idea to tax the specific harm that's being addressed (unhealthyness), not some mostly-but-not-quite related variable (sugar consumption).
That organ transplant example isn't meant to be plausible, but an apocryphal story. You presented a story of "no treatment for you" for someone being grossly negligent with their own body.
I'm pointing out that you'll equivalently have otherwise healthy people who don't get timely treatment because the health care system overall is strained by obesity-related illnesses, tobacco-related cancers etc.
Doing nothing is equivalent to continuing to punish people for their health problems because some other people have preventable self-induced health problems. So I don't think you can make the slippery-slope argument, or claim the moral high ground.
Difficult to implement, how do you know if a given person is obese due to soda or to, e.g., genetics?
And even if it could be implemented, it's still not the point of universal healthcare. In most European countries we'd rather take care of everyone, even those who are guilty of their own health problems.
For example, and even from an egoistic point of view and leaving ethics aside, I'd rather have drug addicts treated and sheltered with my tax money than having to encounter dozens of them, homeless and stinking from bad hygiene, every time I walk the street, as I have seen in many US cities.
No it doesn't. That just some health bloggers questionable hypothesis. Just don't drink a 2L of soda a day mmmm kay? that much sugar is more worrisome than phosphoric acid
Sure, but the reverse is also true. If you drink sugary drinks in levels where they're the primary cause of some massive health problem your healthcare costs will far exceed what can be recouped from sugar taxes.
I'm not saying it's a dumb tax because a triathlete on a model diet who likes to have a can of coke once a month is going to break the bank.
It's a dumb tax because as an instrument of public policy it doesn't begin to do enough to tax preventable diet-caused illnesses. If that's the desired effect we should just operate it like auto-insurance.
A health exam will decide your tax rate, have privacy concerns? Don't do the exam and be in the highest bracket. The same is true for your auto insurance and your accident rate.
It's doubly dumb because it's also enacted due to concerns over pollution, that's a worthwhile thing to fix, but taxing sugar doesn't help. The pollution needs to be taxed, then whoever's selling polluting drink containers (whether they have sugar in them or not) has an incentive to not pollute.
It's also a regressive tax. Someone who's rich pays more towards public health care, and that's generally considered a good idea, but then we're going to say that their efforts to intentionally destroy their health (forcing more expenditures) should be unrelated to income?
Taxes on said sugars would reduce consumption which would reduce health expenditures. Also we should also attack from the other side that makes corn insanely cheap which gets turned into HFCS.
