A Tax on Nips and Tucks Angers Patients, Surgeons

Last week, a 41-year-old woman who had recently had her first child walked into the office of Dr. Steven Teitelbaum in Santa Monica, Calif., for an operation that tens of thousands of women like her have undergone this year: a breast lift.

“I didn’t like the way they looked,” said the woman, Jennifer, who asked that her full name not be used because she wanted to keep her medical procedures private. “And it’s the best money I ever spent.”

But the bill for the kind of operation Jennifer had — and other procedures to combat crow’s feet, beer bellies and sags of other sorts — could also soon be higher under a 5 percent tax included in the health care bill being debated in the Senate.

The tax, which would be paid by the customer but collected by doctors, would be levied on any cosmetic surgery that is not necessary to address deformities arising from congenital abnormalities, personal injuries resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring diseases, a definition taken directly from current tax code covering deductible medical expenses.

The proposal — called the Bo-Tax, in a play on the name of Botox, the popular wrinkle-eliminating treatment — has outraged plastic surgeons, who say they are being singled out because of an outdated perception that people who have cosmetic procedures are well-to-do.
The 7,000-member American Society of Plastic Surgeons said its internal surveys showed that 60 percent of members’ patients earn less than $90,000 a year.

“A lot of people think of this as a tax on rich Republican housewives; rich, nonworking Republican housewives,” said Dr. Phil Haeck, the group’s president-elect. “And that’s not the case.”

Whatever their pay grade, Americans seem to have a growing appetite for nips and tucks. According to the society, there were more than 12 million cosmetic procedures in 2008, up 3 percent from the year before, though the recession was blamed for double-digit declines in liposuction and tummy-tuck procedures. (Belt tightening, it seems, is not good for belt tightening.) ~ Source: NYTimes.com