Proposed Plastic Surgery Tax
How do you pay for a health plan expected to cost nearly a trillion dollars? Easy! You just go after the plastic surgery industry by proposing a plastic surgery tax.
Pay for Healthcare Plan
There is little doubt that the health system in the United States is an utter disaster. Much like Social Security, it is a beast nobody really knows how to deal with or wants to. President Obama certainly seems determined to change that. Whatever your political views, it appears as though we will have some sort of huge healthcare plan. With an expected cost of $800 billion to $1 trillion dollars, the question is how do we pay for it?
Coming up with money for this healthcare plan is a problem. As you've probably noticed, we are in a recession. This means we have less tax coming into the government. Throw in the fact that feds have also been bailing out banks and the like and we are at the point where some of our creditors are starting to get anxious. Finding another trillion appears to be an iffy prospect, so Congress is casting its tax net far and wide.
The cosmetic surgery industry is one target. The Senate version of the healthcare plan calls for raising $6 billion annually by placing an excise tax on voluntary cosmetic procedures. The tax would be 5 percent of the price of procedures ranging from Botox injections to tummy tucks to facelifts to breast augmentation and…well, just about anything that is cosmetic. If you consider the average Botox appointment runs $400, this would equate to an additional $20 in tax.
This plastic surgery tax is an easy sell in the sense that the procedures are not medically necessary, so people don't have to have them. There are a host of other small taxes coming down the road as well. One that is shaping up to occur is the soft drink tax. Soft drinks are terrible for you. There is nothing even remotely nutritional or redeeming about them. In fact, you can pour a 2 liter bottle of Coke into your toilet before going to bed and the corrosiveness of the product will eat everything leaving you with a perfectly clean bowl by morning. Try it! Regardless, government will be taxing these non-essentials to try to come up with the money to pay for healthcare.
Will the proposed plastic surgery tax pass as part of the healthcare plan? All indications are that it will. How unfortunate.
