you never buy things on sale?

You never use a wholesale club?

Do you ever get a AAA, AARP, etc. discount?

How about when you sell stock?

How about when you buy an airline ticket?

Nope, everyone does not pay the same, and as markets get more sophsiticated, they are establishing micro-markets to maximize the profit from each sale.

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It looks like Pauline gave part of the response I was going to give. The remaining part of mine is that everyone goes to the store and pays the same price for the alcohol and tobacco they are going to use. Someone does not pay part of the sale price for them. Birth control should work the same way–if you need some go to Planned Parenthood and buy it yourself (at an already discounted price subsidized by my tax dollars), don’t expect your school to give it to you practically for free.

Of course all of this is made moot by SteveG’s post, which correctly states that the drug companies were providing the pills as part of a marketing plan.

I’m well-aware that I am subsidizing all sorts of things I don’t like every day. When I can do something about it, like change brands, I do.

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Companies sell things at a loss all the time, if they think it can bring them more profit in other ways. Retail stores frequently sell certain products as “loss leaders,” i.e., they take a loss on that item, but they get people into the store where many of them will buy more things.

In this case, the calculus is that women in college will continue to buy contraception for decades after they graduate. If the companies provide drugs at low cost (it’s not clear that it’s actually at a loss, though it may be) to for four years, women will become comfortable and familiar with the brand and will very likely continue to buy that brand at full price for the next few decades.

Your linked article in your response to me is about the prescription drug provision in Medicare, where conservatives in Congress successfully killed the government’s power to negotiate prices for drugs provided by Medicare. I agree that’s corporate welfare, and the Republicans who supported it should be ashamed. But it has nothing to do with this.

In Medicare, the government is actually buying the drugs. On this issue, inidividual college students are buying the drugs,, and the companies are (or have been until now) setting the prices low for their own long term corporate purposes. The two have nothing to do with each other.

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Here’s the link

http://tinyurl.com/yvbyyo

Yeah, it really sounds like he’s opposed to premarital sex. I guess singing filthy songs about sex to thousands of women is OK, and apparently it’s OK for women to “pleasure themselves” while thinking of men, but sex itself is out of bounds.

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Janie [46], what if subsidizing birth control for college students lessens the substantially greater cost to you of them having a child?

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Actually Steve it is a subsidy. I hope you don’t actually believe that the “discounted” rate is not covered in the corporate welfare that drug companies receive from the government to makeup the difference. Drug manufacturers are for-profit institutions and if the distribution of these supposedly discounted drugs were not profitable they would not continue to produce them.

You are correct the article does not talk about the corporate welfare that drug companies receive allow them to absorb the “discounted rate” at still make a profit.

For an example of how corporate welfare (funded by tax payers) from the government provides “discounted” drugs for those in need read this: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0718/p09s02-coop.htm

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If you buy anything at all, you’re subsidizing other people’s choices and options, including some morally objectionable ones. There’s no other way around it. As I pointed out in one of my examples, if you buy gas, you’re keeping a store open that sells alcohol. The store owner doesn’t separate out his gas sales and keep the money separate to promote only gas. It gets dumped into the kitty and the money is used to advertise alcohol. Gas is actually used to sell all those other items. Whether or not you buy them, you’re still subsidizing them when you buy gas. Worse, the money we pay for gas is going to Saudi Arabia and other countries where radicals are being trained. Talk about subsidizing something that’s immoral.

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