Vin Suprynowicz

In 2004, New Jersey Democratic Assemblyman Joseph Cryan had a brilliant idea. Only rich people get cosmetic surgery, right? So — if one of the goals of the redistributive state is to impoverish the rich, thus discouraging them from investing their money in job-creating businesses — why not tax cosmetic surgery? After all, a 6 percent tax on an industry raking in some $500 million a year should generate $30 million a year worth of succor to the drunken and disorderly … right?

The tax was enacted. But the measly $9 million per year it actually generates — less than a third of projections — wasn’t worth the controversy that followed, Mr. Cryan now says. Because the tax exempts “necessary” procedures such as the correction of birth defects, it spurred angry debate with doctors over the medical necessity of individual procedures, while chasing customers out of state. It has also prompted charges of discrimination against middle-class women, who turn out to comprise the majority of patients.

”It was a real education,” Mr. Cryan, who now wants the levy repealed, told Bloomberg News in a telephone interview. “We essentially discouraged the business from happening at all.”

They taxed something, and got less of it? Imagine that!

Susan Hughes, a Cherry Hill, N.J., facial surgeon, reports her business dropped by 10 percent when patients began crossing the state line into Pennsylvania to avoid the tax. Administering the tax also strained relationships with patients and created extra work and costs for her office, she said.

So guess what? U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., now wants to impose a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery, nationwide –one of many new taxes now proposed to help fund his scheme to nationalize American health care.

Meaning New jersey patients would now pay 11 percent.

“We become the tax collector,” Dr. Hughes said in a telephone interview. “Now you’re going to repeat that on a national level? You idiots!”

Barack Hussein Obama famously vowed never to raise taxes on those earning less than $250,000 per year. But Phil Haeck, president-elect of the Chicago-based American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, says “The misconception is they would be putting a tax on rich suburban women, maybe even rich suburban Republican women.” In reality, almost two-thirds of cosmetic surgery patients earn less than $60,000 a year — and 90 percent are women — according to Dr. Haeck.

Reforming health care on the backs of cocktail waitresses and other service workers. And the guy who thought this up represents Nevada?

Senate Majority Leader Reid slapped together his last-minute cosmetic care tax without specifying which products or procedures would actually be taxed. The levy is included in the Democrats’ health-care overhaul, which Sen. Reid hopes to ram through by Christmas, with or without lubricant.

The cosmetic-care levy meets the goal of financing the legislation within the health-care system, explains Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid.

But the Senate proposal is “ill-conceived, dreamt up at the last minute, and discriminatory toward women,” complains David Pyott, chief executive officer of California-based Allergan, which provides Botox treatments for wrinkles (average cost, $391) as well as breast-enlargement implants (average cost, $3,348. What do you think they’d cost if they were covered by Medicaid?)

The federal tax wouldn’t apply to reconstructive surgery, or any procedure needed to improve a congenital deformity, personal injury or disfiguring disease, according to the legislation.

But who will decide what’s “needed”?

Some people may get a nose job “because they want to look better; some people have it because they can’t breathe,” explains Steven Blair Hopping, a Washington surgeon. Reviewing the details behind these decisions with the Internal Revenue Service to determine what’s taxable could constitute “a real violation” of privacy provisions in the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, Dr. Hopping warns.

Beyond the effect on consumers, opponents of the legislation warn that — just as in the New Jersey trial run — it won’t produce as much revenue as Senate Democrats hope for, anyway.

Across the U.S., doctors report a 40 percent drop in cosmetic procedures during the recession. “We already see a sizable number of people going on medical tourism trips to Thailand, South America, Mexico,” warns Dr. Haeck, of the plastic surgeons’ society. “This might tip the balance,” sending even more patients outside our borders.

Of course, Congress could make it illegal to leave the country for medical treatment. Heck, they could even build a wall. Other nations that have nationalized health care and the auto and banking and schooling industries, expanding government many times over, have found it necessary to take firm steps to keep the victims of their confiscations from escaping. Why should the United States be any different?