VAT exemption on cosmetic surgery: center-right motion. Fratoianni: “They help the rich”

The government intervenes with a law to remove VAT from cosmetic surgery operations and guarantee regulatory certainty for operators in a sector, doctors and patients, who have been dealing with the Revenue Agency for some time. This is what the center-right is asking of the executive through a motion presented and signed by all the forces of the majority. “Medicine and cosmetic surgery services – explains the first signatory of the motion, Annarita Patriarch of Forza Italia – must fall within the category of healthcare services not subject to VAT treatment. The concept of ‘health’, in fact, includes every ‘state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’ which ‘does not consist only in the absence of disease or infirmity’. Applying the tax today – continues Patriarca – even requiring payment for the past, represents a critical issue for sector operators and for the patients themselves, as well as contradictory conduct on the part of the tax authorities”.

The motion was signed, among others, also by the Northern League Simon Loizzo and by the deputy of the Brothers of Italy, Luciano Ciocchetti. But criticism has arrived from the opposite front: “While they are preparing to remove the super vignette for those who, for example, own a Ferrari worth 300 thousand euros and pay a tax of 9 thousand which obviously they can very well afford to support, I see that now the right, not happy , asks the government to remove VAT on cosmetic surgery”, says the national secretary of the Italian Left, Nicola Fratoianni, parliamentarian of the Left Green Alliance. And he adds: “Great respect for those who work in this sector, however it would be good to have a different priority plan: I would expect greater attention from the right and from this government on the difficulties of public health, for example towards those who cannot allow dental care, or who are no longer able to pay for their medicines or who wait months if not years to be examined.But evidently the only daily obsession of this government and of the right is – concludes Fratoianni – to curry favor with the richest”.

According to the majority, the provision aims to regulate “the past”: in fact, there have been disputes related to the fact that in 2005 a circular from the Revenue Agency certified the services of medicine and cosmetic surgery as “exempt” from VAT, because ” connected to psychophysical well-being”, but later some local offices of the Revenue Agency contested the lack of payment of VAT in the light of a sentence of the EU Court of Justice according to which aesthetic operations are included in medical treatments, exempt from VAT, only if they are dealing with trauma, handicap and disease. Signatories – complete list also includes Giuseppe Mangialavori, Martina Semenzato, Stephen Benigni, Joseph Bicchielli, Hugh Cappellacci, Gianpiero Zinzi, Alexander Battilocchio – they also claim their intention to “identify for the future a univocal and easy to apply tax legislation that overcomes the recent jurisprudential oscillations on the subject” pertaining to requirements “that we do not consider acceptable”. And this is because, they add, “the services of aesthetic medicine and surgery, considered as a whole, must undergo the same VAT treatment recognized, in general, for healthcare services”, given that the concept of “health”, indicated by the world organization of health, indicates the more general “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”.