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Wait, that's not already illegal? How are they sidestepping the whole disparate impact discrimination thing.
Price discrimination is an economic term that means charge the people who NEED something the most and charge people who are barely willing to buy this the least and have some way of preventing the second group from selling their thing to the first.
Well, that's not quite true - price discrimination really just means being able to charge different people different rates. And, despite the name, it can actually be a very good thing. The people at the front of the aircraft buying absurdly priced business/first-class tickets are helping to subsidize your flight. They're getting a little more comfort than you, but you're both getting the key thing (travel). Or free-to-play games - yes, some are predatory, but there are some absolutely amazing games you can play without spending a cent, because they're supported entirely by whales.
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It can also include charging everyone the maximum they are able to pay. And it can be passed off as "we meet people where they are and offer discounts for low-income patients," which sounds really nice (and may be in some cases), but can in practice take the form of "charging everyone as much as they can afford". This seems to also happen with college tuition: "it costs a million dollars a year to attend, but we'll be nice and settle for the difference between your parents' paychecks and the federal poverty line".
I don't have a firm answer for where I think the ethical line should be on income-based discounts.
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It’s discriminating on ability to pay, which isn’t a protected characteristic.
“We’ll charge him more because he’s white” is illegal. “We’ll charge him more because he has good insurance” is, uh. Complicated.
Isn't the point of disparate impact that it's an end-run around needing evidence of explicit discrimination?
"we'll charge him more because he's white" is explicit discrimination.
"We'll charge him more because he has good insurance, which is statistically correlated with whiteness" is disparate impact.
I believe the current administration has started moving against regulatory disparate impact standards generally, but even where it has applied, it's pretty consistently only in specific directions.
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If they're doing end-runs I don't see why you'd be surprised that the whole "equal protection" bit has clear caveats on who gets discriminated against. The logic is there to hunt down racists who got slightly smarter after the end of segregation after all.
In other countries (Canada) they just make this clear but people have to be smarter in America.
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
Anti-White (and anti-Asian, and Anti-Male) discrimination is de-facto legal, and sometimes mandated. See Students for Fair Admissions as another example.
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