Monday, August 3, 2009

Taxing Face Lifts and Abortions to Pay for Health Reform

Forget taxing the rich, the obese or your employer’s health benefits. Here’s an even better way to turn health reform financing into a wedge issue.

Some members of Congress are reportedly considering a cosmetic surgery tax to help pay for health reform (a.k.a. the “Botax”).

Such a tax could be a big revenue-raiser, since Americans spend billions of dollars on cosmetic surgeries each year. It may also discourage more people from getting plastic surgery (which mothers of teenage girls everywhere might consider a good thing, I suppose).

It might also lead to a slippery slope — and a tax on a significantly more controversial medical procedure. If Congress can tax cosmetic surgeries, asks the libertarian law professor Glenn Reynolds, what about abortion?

Both are performed by doctors, and both are often done on an elective basis. Taxes on both types of procedures have been proposed before, as Paul L. Caron, a tax professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, notes on his TaxProf blog.

Professor Caron cites several tax cases with similar constitutional undertones. In 1983, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that a Minnesota use-tax on paper and ink products violated a newspaper’s first amendment rights.

Jonathan Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, has also weighed in on the constitutionality of an abortion tax.

On the Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog, he writes that such a tax likely would not hold up under scrutiny:

My own view is that, under current law, a tax targeted at abortions would be difficult to sustain. Under Casey, states may not impose regulations that place an “undue burden” on a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy. A law creates an “undue burden” where it has “the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” Any abortion tax large enough to raise a meaningful amount of revenue would likely increase the cost of abortions sufficiently to constitute an “undue burden” under this test.

Source

An interesting article posted at Cosmetic Surgery Financing. Subscribe to Cosmetic Surgery Financing now to get more updates on cosmetic surgery, plastic surgery, dental surgery, laser surgery, gastric bypass, aesthetic surgery, reconstructive surgery and infertility surgery.