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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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