New York Times:  Taxing Face Lifts and Abortions to Pay for Health Reform, by Catherine Rampell:

Forget taxing the rich, the obese or your employer’s health benefits. Here’s an even better way to turn health reform financing into a wedge issue.

Some members of Congress are reportedly considering a cosmetic surgery tax to help pay for health reform (a.k.a. the “Botax”).

Such a tax could be a big revenue-raiser, since Americans spend billions of dollars on cosmetic surgeries each year. It may also discourage more people from getting plastic surgery (which mothers of teenage girls everywhere might consider a good thing, I suppose).

It might also lead to a slippery slope — and a tax on a significantly more controversial medical procedure. If Congress can tax cosmetic surgeries, asks the libertarian law professor Glenn Reynolds, what about abortion?

Both are performed by doctors, and both are often done on an elective basis. Taxes on both types of procedures have been proposed before, as Paul L. Caron, a tax professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, notes on his TaxProf blog.

Professor Caron cites several tax cases with similar constitutional undertones. In 1983, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that a Minnesota use-tax on paper and ink products violated a newspaper’s first amendment rights.