Pulling a few statistics off the Internet, Americans drink 15 billion gallons of soda and 15.7 million gallons of beer every year.
Broken down into 12-ounce cans (recyclable!), how much could be accumulated if a mere $.05 were taxed on each can? (My calculator won't go that high.)
Could some sort of equitable health care reform be paid for with such a tax?
Such a sales tax would be regressive, falling more heavily on low income people than on those with higher incomes, so how could any system that depended on such a tax be called equitable?
The way to rein in health care costs and to finance greater access to services is to reduce the need for services. A recent study showed that obesity in the US costs us about $147 billion a year in health care services. How about if, instead of taxing sugary drinks, the government requires health warnings on all high sugar, high fat foods, similar to those on tobacco products? How about an aggressive federally funded public education program about the dangers of obesity that promotes doable programs for weight control and exercise along with tax incentives for weight loss and for lowering blood pressure and blood sugar through life style changes? If such programs reduced the incidence of obesity in the US by 20%, it would produce a savings of nearly $300 billion over ten years as well as saving the lives of many Americans.
A more aggressive federal program to promote the conversion to electronic records would save many billions more as well as save American lives and prevent much suffering by reducing the overhead associated with managing paper records and film, eliminating the cost of medical mistakes due to incomplete or inaccurate medical histories, eliminating redundant testing, instantly providing comparative effectiveness data for diagnostic and therapeutic procedures relevant to your care to your doctor so that he will know if an older, less expensive procedure will be just as effective for you as a newer, more expensive one.
If instead of changing our system in the most expensive way possible, we apply these savings by building on what we already have by expanding government funded and privately funded free clinics and sliding scale clinics that exist everywhere and providing sliding scale subsidies for catastrophic care insurance, we can achieve universal coverage and rein in health care costs at the same time without raising taxes or acquiring new debt.
That might be what the FEAR of them is!
