National healthcare and "nanny states"

[SemiCharmedQuark]

Cigarettes in Britain are currently up to about 8-9 dollars per pack. On each pack they have written in huge words "Cigarettes Kill" or something to that effect. As you probably already know, many European countries are considering a "fat tax" to encourage healthy eating. Part of the reason they do this is that since they have nationalized healthcare, it is important that they have as healthy a population as possible.

Personally, for national healthcare I'd definitely be willing to take on a fast food tax, cigarette tax, liquor tax... But I rarely eat out, I don't smoke, and I don 't drink so the "sin taxes" don't affect me much. However on DU I see many people absolutely nuts over such things. My question is, for national healthcare, would you be willing to have such items taxed?

[Bridget Burke]

1. I don't think taxes on these items should fund all of health care.

What about letting the tax cuts for the rich die a natural death? What about not causing idiotic, expensive wars?

Since you don't use any of these evil items, I guess you'll NEVER need any health care?

[SemiCharmedQuark]

2. Oh geez.

Look, even taking into account closing all currect tax loopholes, it is still not economically sound for a goverment that shoulders healthcare costs to have its citizens deliberately making themselves sick.

I don't smoke because...whatever. But I don't drink because alcoholism runs absolutely rampant through my family. And I love fast food, but unfortunately being a vegetarian means that my choices are cut short. My point by saying I don't do those things is that it is easy for me to say "yep, tax em to hell" but not necessarily fair to those that can smoke, can eat fast food and can drink (like my parents).

I desperately need healthcare. I pay almost 600 dollars per month in medications. So I would LOVE to see any sin tax to get national healthcare. But again, it wouldn't be fair because I don't like to do the supposed sins, for whatever reason. It's asking other people to make sacrifices for something *I* will benefit greatly from.

[seabeyond]

6. god gives us free will but fellowman cant

inherantly i think it is wrong. i am always opposed to someone telling me to do something cause they decide it is the right thing good thing. example, where we are having issue with a particular religion running our country making the rules. tell you what, tax all the sin products, and along the way, we will outlaw abortion and all the other things we can see as wrong living. gonna depend who has the power to what is wrong. then while we are at it, no producing children with parents who have lifetime costly illness either. because i am telling you, someone born with diabetes is going to be way more costly than my medical need from smoking for a couple decades. oh wait,..........i dont use the doctor, i havent been sick

then i want to control al the people that go to doctor for visits with colds and flus ect.....body should be healing this, dont take antibiotics for cold besides just wrong, costly...........

lets really get into deciding when costing the system whether or not they are taxed or allowed

but, the "good" people will rant and rave adn say yes yes yes and justify adn validate and ignore any point that speaks otherwise

[iverglas]

19. it may not be economically sound ...

it is still not economically sound for a goverment that shoulders healthcare costs to have its citizens deliberately making themselves sick.

But in a "free" society, it's something that people get to do.

That doesn't preclude attempts to discourage and deter them from doing it, of course -- in their own interests as much as in the public's. A major focus of anti-smoking campaigns is usually the effort to persuade young people not to start, just as we try to persuade young people to do (use condoms) or not do (drop out of school) all sorts of things so that they may live longer and happier lives.

The direct costs to the public health care plans are not the biggest selling point for high taxes and other efforts to curb smoking, in Canada, by the way. (A carton of cigarettes costs over $60 in Ontario, and yes, they have all the pictures and warnings plastered all over them, and cigarette ads on TV are prohibited, etc.)

There are a whole host of other costs to a society from things like smoking and obesity beyond those direct costs. Lost working hours (and thus lost taxes) during life, and from premature death, are costs both to the society and to the people and families in it. Less quantifiable effects on quality of life are also important.

I'm philosophically opposed to "sin taxes", because they tend to blame the victim and hurt the vulnerable. Take a retired person in Canada living on the minimum guaranteed income with no public or private pension -- typically a woman -- and say s/he is in subsidized housing; she will usually have under $600 each month after rent, phone and cable TV. She started smoking at a time when the risks were not known, and smoking was heavily promoted by tobacco companies and the media. Or take a single mother on social assistance, who grew up in a milieu where people smoked and who started smoking at 12 or so because that was what people in her socioeconomic/cultural milieu did. She probably has less disposable income than the old person. The addiction is one of the hardest for an individual to kick, and a lot of people just don't have the resources to do it.

So here's this minimum-income person who did nothing wrong, who is essentially being punished. The taxes on the cigarettes are eating up maybe a quarter of her income, and what is society gaining?

But what's the alternative? Make cigarettes available for a dollar a pack, and watch all the teenagers gobble them up?

Prohibition doesn't work, of course. The Canadian government is currently prosecuting tobacco companies for their role in exporting their products to the US and smuggling them back into Canada during the high-tax period of the early 90s; the resulting violence and soaring fortunes of organized crime forced the government to withdraw the taxes. They have since risen, with the tobacco companies no longer at liberty to commit the crimes in question because they got caught. But where there is prohibition of a substance people are addicted to, there will be crime, violence and a windfall to organized crime.

My preference is major smoking-prevention campaigns, with all the assistance possible for individuals' quitting-smoking efforts. And the kinds of laws we have here now about smoking in public places: none is allowed, including in bars and restaurants. I understand people who are miffed about this, and their point about how if non-smokers don't like it they can open their own bars -- but bars are workplaces, and serving staff are workers, and second-hand smoke has indeed killed some of them, and civilized societies don't give people the option of working in lethal conditions and not working.

Anyhow, I guess my point is that it is a false dichotomy to play one person's addiction off against another person's need for health care. Making a direct connection between smoking and health care costs opens such a can of worms -- how about drivers having to pay for road repairs, and parents having to pay the full pop for public schools, and skiers and backpackers having to pay the bill for maintaining emergency rescue services?

In a liberal democracy, individuals get to do pretty much what they want. In a social democracy, individuals are provided with at least a basic safety net that is available to everyone without finger-pointing, based on the understanding that individual welfare is essential to the public's welfare, and the belief that we owe one another assistance and are not qualified to judge anyone as more deserving of it than anyone else.

I think it would be a mistake to base a public health plan on the idea that some people are less deserving than others and should therefore be footing the bill more than others. Super-taxing some people's activities or choices would just be taking the money that some people already don't have for health care and making it the money they don't have for something else. I don't have to choose between engaging in a risky sport, or doing anything else that puts me at risk of illness or injury (as most things in life do), and eating; why should someone else have to choose between smoking and eating?

[blogbear]

4. very true and..

now health care costs are even being blamed on health care tax deductions..It seems most everything here merits AIR time now except the truth!

[Warpy]

8. No, it would make all of them prohibitively expensive, and

that would cause people to avoid them, defunding health care.

However, it would be nice to have sin taxes on these items that would approximate the cost of treating the health problems they all cause in order to keep the national health tax reasonable for people who avoid such things.

In other words, the cost of treating people who are sickened by using all these things the way they are intended to be used should be borne as a cost of doing business. The rest of us shouldn't have to subsidize commerce in poison while the companies that sell it rake in profits at our expense, as well as at the expense of the health of people who choose to use them.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

11. That's exactly what I was trying to get at.

Not that the taxes PAY for healthcare, but that the purpose is to defray the cost of the health problems associated with them or better yet discourage people from using them.

However I'm not sure at all what the correct solution is.

[tinonedown]

3. No.

The corporate fat cats are all lined up on the healthcare side too, salivating over the idea of national health care. Industry is already near ruin due to the creation of 'health insurance' as a right.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

5. Health insurance is a right.

Every person in this country should have the right to basic health care regardless of age, sex, creed or finanacial status.

What corporations? The insurance companies love not having national insurance.

[TahitiNut]

7. (sigh)

Right now, we (U.S.) spend about 15% of our GDP on health care while Canada spends less than 10% of their GDP on health care. In our 'capitalist' society, some people (like Frist) are getting wealthier and wealthier by profiting on the sickness and misery of others. When the health insurance companies make poor investments (e.g. Enron, Worldcom) with their reserve funds, they merely raise the insurance rates to cover the losses. Wealthy people are made wealthier by those 'investments' and wealthy people are made wealthier 'investing' in the insurance companies themselves. The key, of course, is getting somebody else to buy stock before it goes down. Publicly-administered trust funds are good for that.

Now, let's see ... John Q. Yankee pays $15 to a variety of 'providers' for health care ... of which perhaps $4 is paid to government and $11 is paid to profit-making organizations. Jane M. Leaf pays about 9$ to government and less than $1 to profit-making organizations.

Now, why is it a "bad thing"™ to pay $5 more to government in order to pay $10 less to profit-making organizations???

When people argue that some form of sales tax (by far, the most regressive tax of all) be used to distribute the $5 'costs' of national health care, I wonder why they don't argue that the $10 savings be distributed every bit as regressively??

This propaganda-infested public 'discussion' is totally corrupted to shift costs to the poorest and savings to the richest even more than they are now.


Under what theory of 'equity' does it make sense to increase taxes on the sickest and the poorest?

[SemiCharmedQuark]

10. That isn't why Britain taxes cigarettes.

They tax cigarettes to discourage people from smoking so that "in theory" they will be healthier and require LESS healthcare. It's the same reason they are also considering a tax on unhealthy foods since there is currently an obesity epidemic worldwide and obesity is a bitch to pay for. But if they do smoke, hopefully some of the cost will be defrayed in the taxes.

[TahitiNut]

17. Sure. And pimps are trying to discourage prostitution by taking 25%.

I just love the "logic." That's why we tax income - to discourage it. Wow! Who would've known?

Well, it sure works with alcohol, doesn't it? Over 50% of the price of alcohol is taxes in most places.
Damn! Almost nobody drinks anymore!

:eyes:

[SemiCharmedQuark]

18. Hey, I didn't say it worked, I said that's why they did it.

In fact, some studies have shown that if cigarettes are cut off crime increases from people smuggling them in OR the obesity rates increase from people desperately trying to fill the gap. OR far more likely, the people who do smoke/eat out, whatever just get poorer.

I'm not saying it's the right thing, but it's what the current system of national healthcare is. And to be perfectly honest, IF we get a system of national healthcare, it will probably be modeled on the healthcare systems of Canada and Europe, which do have sin taxes.

[redqueen]

12. Thank you.

:thumbsup:

[starwolf]

9. Bad Idea

Using tax policy for social engineering rarely if ever works as intended.

We tax cigarettes for some noble purpose. People cut back on smokes, so the taxes are no longer there. Since we can not abandon that noble purpose, we raise taxes elsewhere. The government is literally as addicted to nicotine as much as the smokers.

If we were to limit use taxes to directly address the costs they incur, it could work, but the politicians lack the discipline for that. For example, road taxes for road related services, property taxes for property related services, cig taxes for smoking related health issues. For example vehicle registration fees support the Highway Patrol and keeping the roads fixed, not water treatment or health care.

Many of the so called tax loopholes also started out as well intentioned incentives to encourage certain behaviors, investment in low cost housing being an example. Same could be said of some social programs.

The law of unintended consequences always beats good intentions.

[ScreamingMeemie]

13. Cigarettes in Michigan have already been taxed to hell and back.

I don't smoke, but I think it's wrong. We all do things considered unhealthy. It would be discrimination, unless it was all taxed.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

15. Well, with Europe's proposed fat tax, it probably would be "all"

I agree with you completely there. It should be all or nothing.

[redqueen]

14. No.

Under a system of national healthcare, we'd pay less.

The best way to encourage healthy lifestyles is through education, not penalties for un-healthy activities.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

16. That's the best idea

Have they actually tried not penalizing activities and going to education instead in any national healthcare state?


Canada and UK have both taxed the hell out of cigarettes. I'm not really sure about other countries though.