PRESIDENT Duterte has certified as urgent the sin tax bill. The Senate and the House of Representatives have only two days left – today and tomorrow, their last regular session – to approve it.
The bill seeks to increase taxes in alcohol and tobacco products; revenues generated would be used to fund the government’s universal healthcare program.
This should be clear: increasing the sin tax is not only for revenue generation. The bigger goal is to protect the right to health of the people and to maintain a broader fiscal space to support the effective implementation of the Universal Health Care Act.
Our legislators are not only deciding on monetary matters. Above all, they are actually deciding on the well-being of millions of Filipinos in the years to come. They can either approve the higher sin tax or allow the country’s hair-raising upsurge in tobacco-induced diseases to spiral precipitously out of control.
We are standing at a critical crossroads for the nation’s public health situation. Senators and congressmen have on their hands a golden opportunity to cut down on what is already the biggest cause of death in the Philippines by passing the bill. If the bill is killed, it will only be a matter of time before an onslaught of smoking-related diseases explodes in our midst.
According to the Philippine College of Physicians’ statistics, at least 300,000 Filipinos are now dying yearly from tobacco-related diseases, a figure which outstrips all other epidemics that the archipelago has ever grappled with. Yet at the same time, smoking incidence has been on a disturbing swing upwards. These trends should alarm enough of our leaders to guarantee the decisive approval of the sin tax proposal that will make cigarettes more out of reach.
We’re already seeing signs of a full-blown health crisis about to burst out, yet the root cause of this crisis is still gaining ground on almost all fronts, especially among our young and our poor Filipinos. The health, and likely even the lives, of at least 17.3 million Filipino smokers are riding on how our congressmen will settle the fate of the six tax reform bill.
Contrary to popular opinion, smoking-related diseases are not illnesses of the rich and the elderly in the Philippines. As early as 2012 a study of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies study found that tobacco prevalence among the poorest 20 percent of Filipinos was 61 percent higher than those at the top of the nation’s income pyramid. Combined with the reality of deplorable access to healthcare among the penniless, this has netted far higher casualties from smoking sicknesses among poverty-stricken rather than well-heeled Filipinos.
If any sector will be forced to endure an even worse outbreak in smoking-related diseases, it certainly will not be those sectors most able to deal with them. The youth and the poor will lose the most. These are the people that we should be defending the most, health-wise as they make up majority of our country’s present and future labor force.
