Players who can't seem to follow the rules -- What can be done?
My experience with people such as this is that they're impatient to start playing, and don't want to take the time to read lots of instructions. The best thing you can do, as @beam022 touched on, is improve the instructions. Make them non-threatening and as easily understandable as possible.
Game element formatting
Graphic symbols--used sparsely--can help. Don't go overboard on symbols, but for the most common of your common game elements symbols can be nice. Dominion, for example uses symbols for money and victory points. It could use symbols for +Cards or +Buy, but those are short, clear words so there's no need. Magic uses symbols for tapping and untapping and for mana costs (maybe a couple other things, but I can't think of any), which is very parsimonious given the level of complexity. Again, they could use a symbol for &quot;target&quot;, but it's probably better that they don't. A few graphics can help people parse things better and add color, breaking up text and making it look more inviting. But only use symbols if you can be sure that they are unambiguous. 7 Wonders, for example, uses symbols effectively, but so extensively that every time I've taught the game to someone new they've needed to refer to the symbol glossary frequently.
Systematic formatting can help too. You give an example of a card where the player discards all cards to get $10. If you have many cards that could be broken down similarly, the text on the card could be formatted as

Pay: Discard all your cards.
Get: Gain $10.

Essentially separating the condition and result into bullet points, I think, makes it harder to ignore, and if this is a pattern that can be easily learned and applied to other cards, all the better.
Instructions style
If my experience generalizes, the people who can't be be bothered to read the rules just want to start playing, so write instructions that help them do that. Most rule books start with identifying pieces and set-up, as they should. If you can, the next sections should briefly state the goal of the game, then get on to a sample turn. Give section number references to following sections of the rules where you'll give details on each phase/step/whatever, but let them get started. In writing, you'll be hard-pressed to hold these players' attention for very long. The best you can do is to facilitate their &quot;diving in&quot; by making it easy to look things up in the rules (via short, well-labeled sections and subsections, a Table of Contents, an Index, and cross-references).