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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with capitalism.

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).

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> This is price discrimination

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 an artifact of capitalism driven healthcare. It's only an issue in the U.S. It's the end results of incentive's designed to extract money vs incentives designed to provide healthcare. (i.e. capitalism)

> This has nothing to do with capitalism.

> This is price discrimination/segmentation.

Firms maximizing profits has... something to do with capitalism

capitalism sucks is just 19 year old redditor cliche for anything they don't understand. You can just ignore people who say that.

Do you deny that capitalism as a system incentivizes groups to make convoluted systems and interactions that increase prices?

You are conflating crony capitalism with free market capitalism. If we are going to argue in terms of pure theory (which you are) then more competition, and therefore the free market, would select for systems that reduce friction between the customer and their wallet. Crony capitalism is what happens when a mixture of regulatory capture, unhinged corporate lobbying, and greed combine to form a trifecta of fuck for everyone else.

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.

> You are conflating crony capitalism with free market capitalism.

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.

> discussing capitalism as it actually always has been,

So you replied to my post calling out your theorycrafting saying my theorycrafting is wrong.

Alrighty.

> So you replied to my post calling out your theorycrafting [...]

Nope, this is wrong already, befoee getting to the rest.

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