Should We Tax Soda? A Carbonated Controversy

Should we tax soda to fight obesity and raise money for health care reform? On the one hand, a food system that encourages us to consume foods that make us unhealthy is not sustainable. On the other, if people want cheap soda, the market should be free to give it to them.

The debate over this question is, according to the New York Times, “fizzing over.”

Forces are massing in the tax’s defense. Articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Daily News support the idea, and President Obama said it is worth considering. The food industry, predictably, is staunchly opposed.

A group of policymakers, doctors, and scientists — including Thomas Farley, New York City health commissioner, and Joseph W. Thompson, Arkansas surgeon general — have detailed the positive impacts such a tax could have on public health and the economy in the Times article and a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

By their estimates, a penny-an-ounce tax on sugary beverages would accrue $14.9 billion in one year, a remarkable amount to put toward health care. Not only would the policy fill public coffers, it would also decrease the soda-slurping that contributes to obesity and other health problems. The authors describe research showing that for each price-hike of 10 percent, soda consumption drops 8 to 10 percent.

But as long as health insurers operate in a system that rewards them for treating conditions like type 2 diabetes instead of preventing them, we can be sure that two Big Industry lobbies will be working to kill this idea. As Michael Pollan recently pointed out in an inspired op-ed for the Times, Big Food and Big Insurance conspire as a society-destroying cabal only when it serves them both.

These two master puppeteers only play well together if we let them team up against us. Right now we are letting them. We let the government subsidize and support the nasty products of Big Food (by funding the production of an avalanche of corn), which leads us to get fat and ill, which leads to a payday for Big Insurance.

If we transform the healthcare system into one in which insurers are rewarded for our health instead of our illness, Pollan argues, we change the equation entirely. Big Insurance would suddenly have an interest in keeping us away from corn-based sugar-bombs and steering us toward the seltzer. And with that powerful force motivated to help us avoid soda, a tax might start looking a little better to lobbyist-oriented lawmakers, as would an even bigger adjustment: the overhaul of the ridiculous subsidies that help Big Food make us fat and ill.

Could all this happen? It's worth noting that our system wasn't always this rigged, just as our soda consumption wasn't always this voracious. “As I love to point out,” nutritionist and food studies professor Marion Nestle writes in her blog, Food Politics, “it did not used to be OK for kids to drink sodas all day long. Now it is.”

Photo courtesy of Brent and MariLynn on flickr