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Amazon Launches a Low-Cost Version of Prime For Medicaid Recipients (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon announced this morning it will offer a low-cost version of its Prime membership program to qualifying recipients of Medicaid. The program will bring the cost of Prime down from the usual $12.99 per month to about half that, at $5.99 per month, while still offering the full range of Prime perks, including free, two-day shipping on millions of products, Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Photos, Prime Reading, Prime Now, Audible Channels, and more. The new program is an expansion on Amazon's discounted Prime service for customers on government assistance, launched in June 2017. For the same price of $5.99 per month, Amazon offers Prime memberships to any U.S. customer with a valid EBT card -- the card that's used to disburse funds for assistance programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC). Now that same benefit is arriving for recipients of Medicaid, the public assistance program providing medical coverage to low-income Americans. To qualify for the discount, customers must have a valid EBT or Medicaid card, the retailer says.
$6x12 = $72. That saves me $27 a year. You are spending those billions in tax savings wisely! See THIS is what trickle down economics looks like! It trickled all over me.
It's basically a case of "you don't get a discount because you're not poor enough and live in the wrong country"
You have the NHS. Why don't you just shut your whine-hole?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's simply "here's a group of people we can be sure aren't willing to pay our full price, so we'll offer them a lower price and hope some buy." They don't have to offer the lower price to everyone who can't afford their full price, because this isn't a charity, it's business strategy.
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So you're buying a hospital visit for the flu, would you like to add an additional warranty for $10?
So I work hard and am not on public assistance, and Amazon wants to punish me with higher prices for that?
I call bullshit
So, they're trying to build a user-base among those who most struggle with health care: The old and poor.
They offer the discount for SNAP and medicaid folks, not for seniors. So your premise is flawed. Where is my old people discount?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I agree that welfare is sort of unfair, what with both requiring you to have low income and refusing to provide any benefit until you have run down your liquid assets (you have to burn through your life's savings first), while also having you pay taxes in.
As such, I have developed a new program which we can implement without raising taxes. This program stabilizes Social Security (permanently), creates a new baseline for minimum wage ($9.75 in 2024, which compounds with the Dividend benefit to equate to a $15.11/hr wage), and pays out to all adults. It's funded by a FICA tax on all income (corporate and personal), so it grows with every productivity growth, thus faster than COLA.
Under this program, middle-income households actually receive a benefit--and in total this comes out to be a reduction in tax burden, compared with today. The tax load is still higher than just cutting the program entirely; it only reduces the cost today, and pays back at least part of your tax obligation in the form of a benefit. Thus you benefit from the participation, immediately.
Lifting up the lowest-income households reduces their need for assistance, which helps to lower the cost of public assistance programs and improve their reach. We can tune them to reach more children in low-income households, or reduce our deficits, or even reduce taxes further. The increased buying power of lower- and middle-income households creates jobs, as well--especially in more-impoverished areas--which further lifts people from poverty and gets them off assistance, freeing up Federal, State, and Local funds for economic development and other programs of benefit to the greater community.
Besides stabilizing households and reducing the tax burden, reducing the utilization of public assistance should also reduce the number of discounted Amazon Prime subscriptions, thus allowing Amazon to charge a lower base rate.
It's amazing what the careful application of well-regulated capitalism can do.
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I suspect that Amazon would be at a comparative disadvantage in playing black marketeer. You don't run an operation of their size without keeping accurate records, otherwise various flavors of fraud not in your favor or sheer inefficiency and confusion would cause things to grind to a halt; and they are a large, obvious, target with a lot to lose if caught.
Now, will their UI make it super easy(or just default to) auto-apply EBT to eligible items in the cart and use a presentation of the result very similar to what you would see if gift cards/rebates/etc. covered those items to give you a feeling of having 'saved' and encourage you to feel that you can afford to add an extra widget or two? That seems much more likely.
I think the chip on your shoulder is warping your perspective. Amazon isn't interested in punishment or your sense of victimized moral superiority.
It's an economic commonplace that price discrimination is in the seller's interest if they can accurately assess the willingness to pay and demand elasticity of their various customers. Doing so perfectly is generally impossible; but more and less granular attempts market segmentation are ubiquitous.
Here, Amazon has a very convenient market segmentation signal neatly implemented for them: a collection of poor customers, presumably less likely to purchase Prime at full price, with eligibility standards and enforcement provided by the state or the feds; and (at least in the case of WIC EBT, not sure about medicaid) a purchasing mechanism built in that is quite similar to other payment cards in terms of processing. What's not to like, from Amazon's perspective?
Should we establish a Department of Virtuous Labor to enact regulations to prevent market actors from doing things, even voluntarily and in their economic interests, that might result in lower prices for filthy poors, to avoid this moral outrage?
Actually it's called price discrimination and is an ages-old pricing strategy.
Real life is overrated.