It's an end run around re-imbursement rates for insurance and how the pharmacy benefit managers get paid. Basically an artifact of why capitalism sucks.
This is price discrimination/segmentation. You want to sell the same product at different prices to different people. And because it is medicine, you do not want (too many) poor people to miss out on getting it, or at least you want plausible deniability for trying to make the product available to poorer people.
Enter manufacturer coupons, PBMs, and myriad government and health insurance reimbursement policies. The whole system is an emergent phenomenon of trying to deliver different quality/quantity of healthcare to different populations, but for political purposes, maintaining plausible deniability that society (via its elected leaders) is okay with some people getting less healthcare than others (or paying more or less than others).
So, the discount is conditional?
How does Amazon know if the user is eligible?
I read the article twice, and nowhere does it say these "coupons" and "pledges" are for some subset of customers.
> This is price discrimination/segmentation.
Firms maximizing profits has... something to do with capitalism
A common trope among anti-capitalists is they conflate capitalism in practice (i.e. crony capitalism) with actual free market capitalism (the theoretical construct).
When debating semantics like you are the difference between these two is fundamentally important.
Phrased a different way: discussing capitalism as it actually always has been, and as the term was coined to refer to, in the real world instead of nonsense fantasy that isn't implementable in reality, and which was only constructed as a distraction from that reality to deflect criticism of the real-world system.
So you replied to my post calling out your theorycrafting saying my theorycrafting is wrong.
Alrighty.
Nope, this is wrong already, befoee getting to the rest.
No medication, no problem. You see, tovarisch!