Our future if we don't stop the botax
Buried in the Senate’s health care bill is a provision that will slap a 5% excise tax on plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures including tummy tucks, botox injections, face lifts, nose bobs and even teeth-whitening.(The law won’t apply to surgery for a deformity or injury.) The “botax” is supposed to raise $6 billion or so over the next ten years to help pay for the overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system.
The proposal has sparked outrage across America, and even as I write, a strange coalition of tea-baggers — those who put them on their eyes to reduce puffiness — is preparing to converge on Washington to protest. Among them:
Women of a certain age who argue that the new tax is discriminatory. (Females comprise 86% of plastic surgery patients.) The Senate, they claim, would never, ever levy a tax on a men-only product, like, say, Viagra. Health plans, which often deny birth-control coverage to women, freely dole out erectile dysfunction drugs, often to men who merely want to be “ready.” The cost: about $3.8 billion a year. If men get their Viagra subsidized, they say, why should women have a tax liposucked out of them?
Manufacturers of wrinkle reducers, who took in more than $2 billion last year, say that the tax is a punitive strike against people who want to look good. As they point out, it’s more important to look good than to feel good.
Plastic surgeons who complain that they’ve been hard-hit by the recession. Imposing a botax will nip and tuck their incomes from the average $300,000 to $791,510 they earned in 2008. If the government imposes the new tax, they threaten, they will abandon their practices to take up more lucrative careers, maybe something at Goldman Sachs.
Baby boomers who say that they will never be able to get or keep a job without getting a little work done (on their faces, stomachs and elsewhere). And who can argue? Sure, the great majority of Americans under age 60, 50, or 40 (depending how you define non-elderly) extoll seniors for their sagacity, their endearing little anecdotes and their utter cuteness. But hire somebody with a face that looks like a prune? No way!
Seriously, this is almost as bad as those death panels that Sarah Palin was yapping about a few months ago. (Do you suppose she’s had any work done?) After all, if you can’t look younger, you may as well let the government put you to sleep.
