Cosmetic surgeons performing breast implants, tummy tucks and dermal fillers have come across an unfamiliar foe. And it’s not fat, wrinkles or shapeless figures.
Their procedures are the targets of a 5 percent excise tax being proposed by Senate Democrats to help pay for the nearly $1 trillion health care overhaul that could extend insurance to tens of millions of Americans. The plan aims to raise $6 billion over 10 years by taxing procedures such as Botox injections, face-lifts and liposuction. The plan excludes surgeries that fix deformities or injuries.
In La Jolla, where many of the nation’s top doctors have set up shop, the so-called “Botax” has plenty of opponents. Many contend that the tax places an unnecessary burden on doctors, who have been hard hit by the recession, and their patients, who aren’t rich housewives, as many suspect.
“If I look at all the patients that come to see me, it’s not the super-rich,” said
Dr. Mitchel Goldman, the former head of La Jolla Spa MD who now leads Goldman Butterwick Keel, which is based in the University Towne Center area. “The super-rich could care less. It’s the 40-year-old mother, the middle-income person.”
Goldman and other cosmetic dermatologists said they don’t think a 5 percent tax would deter any of their clients from getting regular facial fillers and other low-cost procedures. Even in a recession, Botox injections were up 8 percent last year, with doctors performing 5 million procedures at an average cost of $391. But they said it’s unfair to burden their clients with additional costs.
Bad Timing
“It increases the cost to the consumer at a time when they can ill afford increased costs,” said Dr. P. Scott Ricke, medical director of The Institute for Aesthetic Medicine in Solana Beach.
The institute, which offers Botox, hair removal and skin rejuvenation services, serves clients that Ricke said come seeking fixes for “economic” reasons, such as staying competitive in the workplace. Targeting them and the doctors who serve them, he said, doesn’t seem fair.
“If you put a tax on discretionary spending, tax movie tickets, tax tickets to the fair, any kind of show or play,” he said. “If you’re going to target these, target them all.”
Dr. Phil Haeck, president-elect of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said the tax would hit especially hard in tough economic times.
Haeck said 60 percent of women having cosmetic procedures and surgical treatments make between $30,000 and $90,000 a year, according to 2005 data, the most recent numbers available.
Only 10 percent of cosmetic surgery patients, he said, have a household income greater than $90,000.
“In my office they don’t have much choice, but in San Diego they can go across the border and get such a service,” said Haeck, who operates out of Seattle.
