State Bill Emulates Obamacare By Targeting Tanning

Some Pittsburghers felt the first impact of Obamacare last Thursday when the health care law’s 10 percent tax on indoor tanning went into effect nationally. Owners of local tanning businesses and their customers were clearly displeased with the new tax and made their displeasure obvious in a number of local news stories around the region.

But the Pennsylvania Legislature is preparing to impose new burdens on the indoor tanning industry through the “Indoor Tanning Regulation Act” that passed the State Senate unanimously last Tuesday. The bill (accessible here) includes a number of new provisions some of which are largely redundant and others of which are unnecessary or intrusive.

These provisions include:

• A $300 annual licensing fee for indoor tanning salons
• An annual inspection of indoor tanning salons
• Each salon must keep three years of records on file for each customer
• These records, detailing frequency and duration of tanning, are available to the State
• Individuals younger than 14 must possess a physician’s recommendation to tan
• Individuals age 14 to 18 must present signed parental consent every six months to tan

The problem with these regulations is that they accomplish little because the dangers of indoor tanning (and tanning in general) are well known and 90 percent of tanning salons already require parental consent for minors. Additionally, indoor tanning is, in many ways, safer than tanning outdoors because indoor tanning takes place in a controlled environment where you know just how much exposure you are getting whereas tanning outdoors is impacted by many uncontrollable factors. Targeting indoor tanning is pure and simple an assault on industry that, in its overzealousness, could drive people to more dangerous outdoor tanning.

Furthermore, the records requirement imposed on tanning salons and their clients is a gross example of government intrusion into the private lives of Pennsylvanians and a terrible burden imposed on indoor salons. After all, most tanning salons are individual small businesses or part of small, local chains and the burden for keeping three years of records on every customer will add thousands of dollars in cost to each business’s bottom line.

At the root of this problem is the technocratic advocacy of organizations like the American Academy of Dermatologists who believe that their knowledge gives them the right to order society in a way that limits the activities and behavior that lead to various health problems. In pushing this law and laws like it, dermatologists have made life more difficult not just for those who tan for appearance but also those who tan for medical reasons including to treat certain skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder. One-size-fits-all laws that seek to order society for “the greater good” tend to limit the individual liberties of and actively harm those whose habits they seek to change.

The problem with technocratic laws like the Indoor Tanning Regulation Act is that they are incompatible with republican systems where people are citizens to be respected and not cattle to be cared for. Certainly, indoor tanning legislation does not grab headlines or define politics the way that Obamacare and other “landmark” legislation does but this kind of unnecessary regulatory legislation slowly erodes our individual liberty in a way that “landmark” legislation never will.