US News

POLS WEIGH ‘NIP & TAX’ PLAN

WASHINGTON — Call it the “Bo-tax.”

Lawmakers have discussed slapping a 10 percent excise tax on cosmetic surgeries such as face-lifts, tummy tucks and hair transplants to help foot the bill for health-care reform.

Procedures that would be eligible for the new tax are those not considered medically essential, including nose jobs, liposuction, teeth-whitening procedures and Botox injections.

Reconstructive surgery due to cancer or laser eye surgery would be exempt from the tax.

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Lawmakers were also weighing a tax on video games to discourage a sedentary lifestyle, sources said. “I do know it’s been floating around in the ether,” a source said.

The Bo-tax proposal first came up during a meeting in mid-July during a meeting between White House officials and the Senate Finance Committee, sources told The Post.

Among those in the meeting was Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, but he did not float the idea, the Obama administration insisted yesterday.

Politico.com reported that Treasury Department economic adviser Gene Sperling was the brains behind the Bo-tax.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) insisted last night it was something the negotiators had previously dismissed.

“That’s not been on any list I’ve seen in a long time,” Baucus told reporters.

Baucus’ committee is scheduled to meet next week to figure out how to pay for the trillion-dollar-plus plans for insuring more Americans.

It was unclear how much money a tax on breast enlargements and such would raise since the Congressional Budget Office has not calculated the potential revenue.

Malcolm Roth, a plastic surgeon at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and an official with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, told the National Journal, which first broke the story, that the Bo-tax “would be a discriminatory tax against women.”

He said that 86 percent of patients are female and 91 percent are of working age, between 19 and 64.

Roth rejected the claim that it would be a “tax on the wealthy,” saying most patients earn less than $100,000 a year.

“People put money aside for years, sometimes weekly under-the-mattress deductions” to get the surgery they want, he told the National Journal.

Meanwhile, the Senate edged closer to a health-care compromise that omits a requirement for businesses to offer coverage to their workers and lacks a government insurance option that President Obama favors, according to officials.

Officials said a bipartisan compromise in the Senate would not subject companies to a penalty if they declined to offer coverage to their workers.

They also said any legislation that emerges from the talks is expected to provide for a nonprofit cooperative to sell insurance in competition with private industry, rather than giving the federal government a role in the marketplace.

churt@nypost.com