Why is it that the poor who are helpless and downtrodden are often the victims of exploitation?

We have seen how the Value Added Tax (VAT) impacts the poor the most, for it is a huge burden for them to have to pay extra for goods purchased. Since it is a flat consumption tax,low-income households pay a higher proportion of their income on VAT compared to higher-income households. Those who can least afford it suffer the most, whereas those who are higher earners do not, because they can invest their savings to offset the VAT.

The Philippines and Indonesia have the highest VAT rate at 12 percent compared to Singapore (nine percent), Vietnam (10 percent), Thailand (seven percent), Malaysia (6-10 percent), Laos (seven percent), Myanmar (five percent), Timor-Leste (2.5 percent). Brunei has no VAT. Considering that the Philippines is a regional laggard economically, with lower per capita income than Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. With 49-50 percent of families rating themselves poor, there are 16.3 million families who are suffering the most from the effects of regressive taxation.

The poor likewise suffer a double whammy, for despite paying through the nose for basic goods’ VAT, they don’t feel the effects of their paying VAT in terms of economic development. The taxes paid have been drained by corruption at the local and national levels, with billions allegedly pocketed by some politicians charged with crafting the national budget. In terms of infrastructure, the Philippines’ ranking has declined, which is a no-brainer considering the huge sums that disappeared without any infrastructure built.

The poor get no relief when it comes to health care. They have to line up in government hospitals, often in the early morning hours just to get seen by a health care provider in the late morning and even afternoon.

Even worse, based on what the patients said, and confirmed by hospital officials, there are syndicates operating in government hospitals victimizing these patients. My classmate, who was once a Provincial Health Officer, told me it does happen. Even if all services are provided for free, patients are told that if they want to speed up their treatment, they have to fork over money, only to find out it wasn’t true.

The same thing happened in a Metro Manila government hospital where I referred a woman who needed surgery for enlarged tonsils. My pre-med classmates and I were giving her money for incidental expenses to get to the hospital during her consultations. She was told that she needed a CT scan so we still provided the money. She sent a photo of the receipt, which was just a plain, store-bought receipt with no official heading. That was when we knew this was happening. This is really unconscionable.

Imagine, you pay taxes on everything you buy, yet you can’t even get decent health care without being scammed by some unscrupulous hospital employees. Multiply this by the number of such cases all over the country and it is a scandal waiting to be exposed.

It is no different from the fixers that crawl all over government offices everywhere, promising to make your travails easier because the bureaucracy had made it time-consuming and difficult to avail of basic government services. Sometimes, it is the government employees themselves who resort to scamming the uninitiated public.

This is why there are so many government rules and regulations that most people don’t understand. When you can’t negotiate the complicated processes required to avail of government services, somebody will offer to “fix” it for you to get ahead of the line, or get the driver’s license quickly.

The long-suffering public should be given a respite from all these trials and tribulations. Ease of doing government transactions should be simplified and made easier, faster and more transparent. There are moves by more enlightened city governments like Pasig and Quezon City that will make dealing with government less stressful and faster. But as with everything, those often in charge of these processes will resort to other underhanded tactics to extort more money from the public.

Is there a real solution to this issue? Reforming the bureaucracy in this country is akin to cleaning out the Augean stables, an impossible task. Once a solution is found, the bureaucrats find a way to get around it.

But it is imperative to do so, as the country is lagging due to massive corruption at the national and local levels, and the large majority of the population suffers the consequences.

It sucks to be poor in the Philippines. It is high time we devise means to eliminate the machinations of these corrupt bureaucrats. Civil society leaders should speak out and propose measures to curb the excesses of our “public servants,” who make our lives miserable.

We await the true leader who will lead us out of this morass of corruption and poverty.