Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores

Under the scenario that the Maryland law is outlawing, the richer customer who is being charged the higher price by the grocery store still finds the product to be worth it to them at the higher price. And since their time has value, and they're just grocery shopping, and they're rich and not trying to pinch pennies, they'll just buy the thing at the price the store is asking. There will be less consumer surplus for them, as I said, than there would be if the store were charging them the same price as the average middle class person--but it's highly doubtful that it will be worth their time to try to extract that extra consumer surplus from the store. That's why stores want to price discriminate in the first place--because they know the richer customers won't bother trying to haggle over price.

No, the price the customer is willing to pay for a given product is different for every customer. But the demand curve is just the aggregate of all that--how many customers are willing to pay a given price for the product, as a function of the price. There are different demand curves for different products, but the notion that there is a different demand curve for every customer for a single product makes no sense.

> BTW, do you also feel it is unfair if a store charges a person less if the store realizes the person is a bit needy?

I've said nothing whatever about whether or not I agree with the Maryland law under discussion here. I'm just trying to be clear about what the law does and doesn't do.

> I could not just raise prices and "extract" more profit

You can't raise prices for all customers and expect more profit, of course.

But if you can raise prices only for those customers who are willing to pay higher prices, i.e., if you can price discriminate, then yes, you can extract more profit by doing that--as I've said multiple times now, you're transferring what would otherwise be consumer surplus to yourself. And if the cost to you of getting the extra information you need to price discriminate is less than the consumer surplus you're able to extract by doing so, then it's profitable for you to do it if you can.

Doing what I've just described is what the law under discussion here outlaws.

Healthcare is an inelastic market, people are willing to pay anything to get it. Private insurance companies have grown into a kind of cartel and are able to jack up prices at will, going as high as customers are able to pay. They are disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, to increase their margins. These companies are so powerful, and officials are so easily corrupted, that they are able to get their way with legislation every time.

All of this combines into a huge vicious cycle that is able to extract more and more wealth for worse and worse results.

Americans used to live longer than Europeans, you know? Now it's the opposite. Certainly, food in America is worse and people drive more instead of walking. But then again, the State isn't incentivized to keep its citizenry healthy, since it doesn't pay for healthcare. To me, this is part of a package deal, there's no sense in trying to decorrelate public health from healthcare systems.

Medicare works pretty well and the VA works pretty well despite all the negative propaganda. Both are different systems but both have government regulations on pricing.

People are pretending that in the private US health care system everybody gets stellar treatment without waiting times. That is simply not true. When I compare the waiting times my family in Germany has vs how much friends in the US are waiting, I don't see much difference. US quality doesn't seem better either. The main difference seems to be that in the US people are constantly strategizing whether they want to risk paying a month's salary for taking an ambulance or going bankrupt when they have a serious illness. Whereas in Germany they go to the doctor when they need to.

Yes, you can have super shiny new treatments in the US if you can pay but I prefer a system that first covers the most common problems in an affordable way.

When, in WW2?

>They are disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, to increase their margins.

I've experience both systems. It's worse (for me) with European state-run healthcare I am right now, where they are even more disincentivized to pay for expensive treatments, except not to increase margins but because the system is constantly broke, so the treatments are always long-wait and last-gen compared to the cutting edge fast-track you get in the US, if you're insured, or you pay through the nose for it, or your insurance does if you work for a decent company.

So that doesn't explain why Americans live less despite being able to get cutting edge care faster. You know, maybe a diet of processed food and sedentary lifestyle can't be undone by a faster MRI/surgery appointment with cutting edge equipment.