Opioid tax is cruel medicine
Last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature imposed a novel tax on opioids that explicitly prevented drug makers from passing the cost to consumers. The legislation was poorly conceived — so poorly, in fact, that a federal judge ultimately declared it unconstitutional.
Now, the governor is back with a proposal that’s worse: An opioid tax that explicitly allows drug makers to shift the cost to consumers.
We can understand why taxing opioids appeals to Mr. Cuomo. The tax would raise $100 million for a state facing a $2.3 billion budget deficit, and it targets the pain-killing medications at the center of a devastating and costly epidemic of addiction.
Opioid makers are easy and compelling bad guys, given how they so ruthlessly promoted the pain killers. Who could object to making Big Pharma pay for an epidemic it helped create?
And so the original tax was described as “an opioid epidemic surcharge” that would punish the industry for the crisis and generate revenue to combat it. The governor’s budget called it “a financial disincentive for the use” of opioids.
The descriptions were a bit contradictory, if not disingenuous. If the cost wasn’t to be passed to consumers, how could it serve as a disincentive? The tax legislation did not include a corresponding increase in spending to address addiction or prevention. How would this cure anything other than holes in the budget?
The tax was declared unconstitutional in December for several reasons, including the clause that banned manufacturers from passing the cost to consumers. While allowing them to do so may make the new version of the tax constitutional, that doesn’t mean the new proposal is a good idea. It certainly isn’t.
New York doesn’t tax prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and it shouldn’t open that door. Once opioids are taxed, the temptation to tax other medicines will be strong — and prescriptions and drug coverage many New Yorkers already struggle to afford could become more costly.
For all the problems they’ve caused, opioids are still vital for the people they are intended to help. Why should consumers who use opioids legitimately, including the terminally ill and others suffering from debilitating pain, be forced to pay more?
A tax on opioids is essentially a tax on pain.
None of this means the pharmaceutical industry behaved responsibly when it spent millions upon millions, including on lobbying and political donations, to ensure maximum public access to opioid drugs that makers knew were highly addictive and potentially dangerous.
Opioids, of course, have proven to be massively profitable, and drug makers should certainly pay for the crisis that has followed. But New York is already pursuing a method to address the misdeeds of opioid makers. It is suing them, seeking damages and civil payments.
That makes sense. A tax on people in pain does not.