Holy cow!

Congress Daily recently reported that the US Senate Finance Committee has discussed imposing a 10% surtax on many cosmetic procedures that it deems "unnecessary" for medical purposes, in order to generate some of the billions needed to fund the health-care reform scheme.

The Senate panel's chairman, Max Baucus, says he heard some "interesting," "creative," and "kind of fun" ideas in a meeting earlier this month with Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag during which the tax on tummy tucks and such was brought up.

Credit for bringing the story to wider attention also goes to the Drudge Report, which featured accompanying photos of Vice President Joe Biden and his hair implants and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with wide eyes, unfurrowed brow, and taut jawline not typical of most grandmothers. Plastic Surgery Tax Eyed As Revenue Raiser (hat tip to Wendy):

The tax, which has not been officially scored, would plug some of the revenue gap senators are seeking to fill to keep on schedule for a markup the week of Aug. 3. It would target procedures prohibited under Section 213 of the tax code, which deals with itemized deductions for medical expenses not covered by health insurance.

The 1990 deficit-reduction law prohibited taxpayers from taking deductions for cosmetic surgery "unless the surgery or procedure is necessary to ameliorate a deformity arising from, or directly related to, a congenital abnormality, a personal injury resulting from an accident or trauma, or a disfiguring disease."

The law defines cosmetic surgery as "any procedure which is directed at improving the patient's appearance and does not meaningfully promote the proper function of the body or prevent or treat illness or disease."

According to the IRS, deductions for procedures such as reconstructive surgery due to cancer or laser eye surgery would be allowed. But nose jobs, liposuction, teeth-whitening procedures and Botox injections to smooth wrinkles would be prohibited under Sec. 213 and subject to the new tax.

A number of states have tried to impose excise taxes on cosmetic surgery, with little success. The only state with such a law on the books is New Jersey. Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine vetoed a bill to repeal the state's 6 percent tax on cosmetic surgery gross receipts in 2007, even after the repeal passed unanimously in both the state Assembly and Senate.

Malcolm Roth, vice president for health policy and advocacy at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said the New Jersey tax has only brought in about 25 percent of anticipated revenue since it was enacted in 2004 and imposes "another bureaucratic layer," including questions of how to determine what procedures are eligible. Roth said lawmakers at the federal level could expect the same administrative headaches and lack of anticipated revenues if they went down the New Jersey route.

Two recent papers piqued my interest in how people come to the conclusion that they "need" plastic or cosmetic surgery. The first, by Julie Albright of the University of California, studied the notion of how the media -- including news outlets, TV shows, and other cultural influences -- pressures college-age women to feel poorly about their looks, to the point at which a physician is approached to "relieve" their low self-esteem via aesthetic surgery.

The other report, by PhD candidate Kristi Scott at the University of Southern Indiana, examines how people choose to undergo cosmetic plastic surgery and how their surrounding relationships are affected by their decision.

Scott also gets into the notion that people who have been manipulated by the media, peers, and the culture (in general) feel that positive outcomes validate the patient's illusion of “correction” by surgery and various genetic issues. Cheating Darwin: The Genetic and Ethical Implications of Vanity and Cosmetic Plastic Surgery:

There are many relationships to be considered with [cosmetic surgery], the first being between the individual and her inner-self. According to Naomi Wolf, “Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about ‘beauty’ date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented” (Wolf, 1991). She speculates that, during this time, there must have been some kind of discovery of how to keep women continuously feeling insecure about their looks so that they would buy more products to make them look like the “ideal beauty” (Wolf 1991). The beauty industries profit by keeping this inner conflict, between the individual and her inner-self. To be motivated to purchase more products, an individual needs to be insecure about her self so that she feels the need to purchase something that will correct the perceived problem. This communication to women isn’t coming solely from the corporate industries that create and produce these products, but also from the mass media in general. They, too, are involved in perpetuating the belief in an ideal form of beauty to which women should aspire.

Read it all.