March 23 marked the three-year anniversary of the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and to mark the occasion Sunshine State News presents the first in a series of installments reviewing the law's top 10 hidden tax hikes.
One of the first increases to go into effect, barely three months after President Obama signed the bill to go into law, was the so-called tanning tax, a sin-tax that added a 10 percent surcharge to the bills of customers availing themselves of indoor tanning salons.
This particular measure had an interesting legislative pedigree. Democratic congressmen had considered imposing a 5 percent excise tax on cosmetic surgery, a proposal popularly dubbed the Botax, after the Botox treatments that would have been covered under the provision. But the dermatology and cosmetic surgery lobbies were having none of it.
Dr. David M. Pariser, the president of the American Academy of Dermatology, boasted to the New York Times in December 2009 that his association proposed to legislators during the drafting process that the 5 percent tax on his industry be replaced with a 10 percent exaction on indoor tanning salons.
We made the case this will reduce health care costs by hopefully reducing skin cancer in the future -- thats the point -- and also raise a little revenue now, Pariser told the Times.
Ryan Ellis, tax policy director for Americans for Tax Reform, the advocacy group founded by conservative economist and watchdog Grover Norquist, suggests less altruistic forces were at work in Pariser's proposal.
The tanning salon industry is not nearly as well organized as the Botox and cosmetic surgery industry, he explains to SSN. It's a perfect example of a well-organized industry throwing a non-well-organized industry under the bus; that's exactly what happened.
In 2010 the Indoor Tanning Association (ITA) estimated the new tax would impact some 18,000 small businesses. The association also says that the vast majority of tanning salons are owned by women, and that women also make up about 75 percent of employees and customers an ironic observation, given that cosmetic surgeons themselves had complained that the original proposed tax on their industry amounted to sex discrimination because most of their customers are also women.
The tanning tax, contained in pages 2,397 to 2,399 of a law that runs more than 2,400 pages, seems to be a violation one of many, as this series will show of a promise the president repeatedly made to taxpayers before he signed Obamacare into law.
I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase, candidate Obama told a New Hampshire audience in September 2008. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.
Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden repeated that pledge in his televised debate against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
No one making less than $250,000 under Barack Obamas plan will see one single penny of their tax raised, whether its their capital gains tax, their income tax, investment tax, any tax, Biden insisted.
In December 2009 White House spokesman Robert Gibbs explicitly said the pledge would apply to the health care law.
Except it didn't; the tanning tax applies to all Americans who avail themselves of these particular salon services, no matter what their family income. The federal government expects to collect about $2.7 billion in revenue from the exaction by 2020.
In June 2012, the ITA attributed the closing of some 3,100 tanning businesses, and the loss of some 35,000 jobs, since 2010 to Obamacare and its tax on their industry.
First in a series of the Top 10 Obamacare Taxes
Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews.com or at (954) 235-9116.
