Financing Health Care For Needy Via Botox Tax

The Issue

One of the problems we have in this country is that we have a lot of people that don’t have health insurance. There are lots of reasons for this. Sometimes the response is “well they can always go to the county hospital.” I think this is a bad response because visits to the county hospital are usually only for emergencies and don’t include checkups and preventative care (e.g. cancer screening, blood tests, etc).

The sad thing is that many of the uninsured include children who don’t have any say about the situation to which they are born or don’t really care about the old Clinton-Graham debates of the early 90′s. The problem is that there are a lot of children (and adults) who fall in this trap of not having company-provided health care or not being otherwise able to afford private health insurance.

Botox Tax?

One idea that seems attractive to me is to transfer some of the resources being used for elective cosmetic health care procedures into resources to cover people who fall into the private insurance gap. This could be implemented similar to the way luxury tax are implemented by putting a very tight fence around what would be considered “elective cosmetic surgery”.

Counter-Points

I floated this idea to the Texas Comptroller who was impressed by the idea and understood the need (especially for child health insurance) but she expressed doubts that it would be practical to implement this through the legislature. Also many doctors have expressed concerns about the “slippery-slope” of taxation of medical procedures and difficulties in defining “elective” surgery. I think these are valid concerns but the idea could be explored further. At the very least perhaps some of the clearly elective procedures such as Botox could be included.