A little-noticed provision of the Senate bill
approved last month would slap a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning
treatments to help extend health-care coverage to millions of uninsured
Americans.
Government analysts have estimated the tax will raise
But tanning salon owners said they’re already getting squeezed like a bottle of Coppertone.
LaVassar recently sold a location in
Last year he closed three others, laid off 40 employees and slashed
prices as much as much as 20 percent to attract new clients. He said a
new government health-care tax would likely come out of his profit if
he can’t pass it along to customers.
LaVassar said the vast majority of his 60 employees
are part-timers for whom he doesn’t provide health insurance. While the
proposed legislation is aimed at helping workers like them, LaVassar
said higher taxes on employers like him could prove counterproductive
if it results in fewer jobs.
“There will be more layoffs and maybe more
closures,” he said. “This tax is just one more blow I don’t think many
of us will be able to take.”
Financing the nearly trillion-dollar health-care
overhaul is shaping up to be one of the biggest challenges facing
lawmakers. Proposals in the House and Senate include a surcharge on
high-income taxpayers, an increase in the estate tax and a 40 percent
tax on high-cost “Cadillac” health policies — all of which have raised
objections from affected groups.
But some industries, helped by lobbyists and high-powered trade organizations, have fended off efforts to tax them.
The Senate targeted tanning after plans for a
“Botax” aimed at the plastic surgery industry were dropped under
intense pressure from doctors and drugmakers. That proposed 5 percent
tax on elective cosmetic procedures would have raised an estimated
over 10 years. It would have applied to services including liposuction
and injections of Botox, the wrinkle relaxer whose 2008 sales reached
The
company helped finance the Web site Stopcosmetictax.org, which
denounced the tax as punitive to women and the middle class. The site
urged consumers to write their senators.
Nearly two dozen industry groups also worked to
derail the Botax. Among them was the American Academy of Dermatology
Association, which spent a record
lobbying through the first nine months of last year, according to data
compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan,
nonprofit
In all, nearly
“That’s the largest lobbying output for that period of time ever spent by any business sector in the history of
he said. “You literately have had hundreds and hundreds of lobbyists on
the issue of health care reform, hundreds and hundreds of people who
have scheduled meetings with staffers and lawmakers themselves. That’s
why this has taken so much time and that’s why we’re still not with a
bill that is ready to be signed by the president.”
But what really chaps tanning salon owners is that
cosmetics big shots urged legislators to slap the tax on their small,
fragmented industry.
There are about 20,000 tanning salons in
Most of those small businesses are owned by and cater to women, said the association’s executive director,
He said lawmakers that profess concern about gender discrimination with
a plastic surgery tax don’t appear to have the same worries when it
comes to his industry, which lacks high-paid lobbyists.
Overstreet predicted that the tanning tax wouldn’t bring in anywhere near the
“The Senate, they didn’t do their homework on this,”
Overstreet said. “Nobody called us up to see how this would affect the
industry.”
The Senate bill calls for the tax to go into effect on
applying to any tanning method that uses ultraviolet radiation. Non-UV
tanning services, such as spray-on tans, and UV phototherapy prescribed
and performed by doctors and other licensed medical professionals,
would be exempt.
Some boosters of the tanning tax hope it will
discourage the use of indoor tanning beds, which have been linked to
health problems such as melanoma.
“Why not do something that would be good for the
public’s health, help drop down the number of people, particularly
young women, who get skin cancer, and generate some tax revenue at the
same time?” said
American Academy of Dermatology Association. “So we suggested a tax on
indoor tanning and it seems like (lawmakers) liked the idea.”
But
“They’re treating tanning like it’s alcohol or
cigarettes and something that should be taxed because it’s bad for
you,” he said. “But it’s not bad for you if you don’t burn yourself and
over-tan. Too much of anything is a bad thing, but this tax will create
a stigma that could hurt worse than the tax itself.”
Tanning devotees are steamed as well.
She said the proposed tax is another example of the government hitting
the small fry that lack the political clout to fight back.
“It makes me angry,” Perkins said. “They’re just
looking for another thing to tax. And rather than finding permanent
cuts in the health-care system it’s easier for them to pick on the
little guys like tanning shops.”
A 52-year-old stay-at-home mom, Perkins said she’ll
keep tanning as long her finances will allow. But the prospect of
higher prices could fade her golden glow.
“In this economy you go day by day,” she said. “You
never know. Maybe in three or four months I might not be able to afford
the tans anymore, either, because of the tax or because of something
else.”
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