Alagang Angara

Senator Sonny Angara said the government will be in a better position to fill the massive funding gap for the universal health care (UHC) program with the passage of the bill increasing the excise tax on tobacco products.

“With the approval by both the Senate and the House of Representatives of the bill seeking higher tobacco excise taxes, we have come one step closer to giving the government more elbow room to plug the funding gap for the UHC program that aims to provide all Filipinos with affordable and quality health care,” Angara said.

Senator Sonny Angara on Monday endorsed to the Senate plenary a bill increasing the excise tax on tobacco products in a bid to reduce smoking prevalence among Filipinos and raise crucial funding for the government’s Universal Health Care (UHC) program.

This developed as the Senate Committee on Ways and Means, which Angara chairs, adopted a committee report on the consolidated measure that will raise the excise tax for every cigarette pack from P35 to P60 for the next four years.

I am honored that the Filipino people have allowed me to serve another term as Senator.

Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara renewed his call for the full implementation of a law requiring all schools nationwide to teach the history of Filipino Muslims and indigenous peoples (IPs), saying a study of Philippine history and culture would be incomplete without their mention.

Amid rising population of Filipino senior citizens and scarcity of specialists to treat them, reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara is urging medical students to pursue geriatric medicine, a specialty that focuses on the health care of elderly people.

The number of Filipinos at or over age 60 almost doubled to 8 million from 4.6 million between 2000 and 2018, according to government data. But despite this staggering number, there are only over a hundred doctors who specialize in treating senior citizens.

With the construction of the first railway in Mindanao finally happening this year, reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara reiterated his proposal to create the state-owned Mindanao Railways Corp. that would oversee the efficient operation and maintenance of the future train system in the country’s second largest island.

Angara said the proposed “MindaRail” would serve as an instrumentality of the government in providing a railway system that would potentially bring peace, economic development and poverty reduction in Mindanao.

Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara lauded President Duterte for signing into law a measure that would exempt first-time jobseekers from paying fees on government-issued documents in connection with their job application.

Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara is confident the Philippines will be in a better position to sustain its high economic growth after college education and health care have been made more accessible to Filipinos through the Free College Education Law and the Universal Health Care (UHC) Act.

Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara is urging local government units (LGUs) to allocate more local resources for education and assume greater responsibility in ensuring that every student in their respective communities will have access to quality public education.

Reelectionist Senator Sonny Angara is urging the families of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Libya to convince their loved ones to return to the Philippines as soon as possible after the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) raised to the highest level the crisis alert in the North African state due to intense fighting around the capital city of Tripoli.

The DFA declared Alert Level 4, which requires mandatory repatriation and a total ban on OFW deployment to Libya, where more than 3,500 Filipinos are currently employed.