I’ve had a little of a debate with a commenter recently where they’ve argued that “donating” (selling, in their words, because you can get money for it) your blood plasma is a scam because it’s for-profit and you’re being exploited.
Now, I only have my German lense to look at this, but I’ve been under the impression that donating blood, plasma, thrombocytes, bone marrow, whatever, is a good thing because you can help an individual in need. I get that, in the case of blood plasma, the companies paying people for their donations must make some kind of profit off that, else they wouldn’t be able to afford paying around 25€ per donation. But I’m not sure if I’d call that a scam. People are all-around, usually, too selfish and self-centered to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, so offering some form of compensation seems like a good idea to me.
In the past, I’ve had my local hospital call me asking for a blood donation, for example, because of an upcoming surgery of a hospitalised kid that shares my blood group. I got money for that too.
What are your guys’ thoughts on the matter? Should it be on donation-basis only and cut out all incentives - monetary or otherwise? Is it fine to get some form of compensation for the donation?
Very curious to see what you think
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I think that the commenter lives in a country with for-profit hospitals. In Europe hospitals get subsidized so they all make good money and aren’t driven to pursue profits. Prices are being kept low because of taxes and social health care. There are some for profit hospitals, but not many.
Yea, US
Donating blood/plasma is a good thing. Economic conditions in which poor people feel obligated to give blood just to make enough money, whilst rich people don’t feel this same pressure, are bad.
I don’t know how exactly private blood banks work (in plenty of countries blood banks are public and presumably non-profit), but regardless, I assume nobody can get blood transfusions if nobody donates. So until the political system is overhauled just keep donating? Your blood donations aren’t the root cause of capitalism
I donate plasma regularly - at least once per month. It’s illegal to pay people for blood or plasma here in the Netherlands so I’m just in it for the good feels. I also like the downtime and relaxed chatting and joking with the people who work there.
The same worries exist here too though. The blood bank isn’t allowed to pay you for your plasma, but it’s absolutely a for-profit organisation that runs on selling your plasma to pharmaceutical companies.
I still believe it’s a good thing to donate, but sometimes it feels a little icky that there’s also a businessmodel around it
Man, the Netherlands sound pretty pleasant, overall.
Anytime we ask questions about poor people doing things to make a buck, you probably won’t find me talking negatively or blaming the people with few to no options.
I’ve been in a financial situation where selling my blood plasma was an easy, safe, guaranteed amount of money that kept me from getting deeper into the hole. I’m not going to knock anyone who does it, only the shitty social services that fail people to the point they have to sell their plasma to survive.
I’ve been there myself too. I didn’t necessarily have to donate plasma twice a week for a couple months since I could have asked my parents for money, but I’m very reluctant when it comes to asking for money and want to do things independently, on my own as far as possible. So yea, while between jobs, I was reliant on this steady source of income to be able to afford rent. It sucks but that’s reality. And yea, I quite agree that this is an underlying systematic failure of the government and not necessarily a fault of the blood bank
I’ve donated plenty of times, because it makes sense that there is no other way to save lives than to donate.
On the other hand, I’ve been wondering for years, that while I’ve been told a million times that “blood reserves are low - donate blood now!”, I’ve not ever heard that a single person died due to lack of available blood.
Why would something like that not be reported if you want to motivate people to donate?My personal guess is that this comes because “lack of avaiable blood donations” isn’t a valid cause of death, the cause of death is whatever else (gun shot wound, knife severed artery / complication during surgery etc), thus it’s hard to pinpoint. Also Doctors may try to “save” blood, when they know little is available, and people may die that may have lived if they had gotten (more) blood, but also they may not have and it is hard to tell.
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I think it’s fine to pay some for it.
I don’t know how your healthcare system is structured. But let’s assume there is a profit motive in getting you to donate blood. Let’s also assume profit is a problem. So we want to reduce profits.
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If you get €25 per donation that is €25 less profit for them per donation.
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The demand for blood is going to stay the same. No one will decline a live saving surgery because it’s a bit expensive and will pay anything to get it. Increasing supply will decrease profit margins.
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I’m not allowed to give blood since I’m gay and have an active sex life
I found out not long ago that I can’t donate blood in the US because I’m British and lived here during the 1990’s so could theoretically be carrying mad cow disease.
It’s fucking discriminatory in my opinion and it has always made me uncomfortable filling out the blood donation paperwork.
We can reliably screen for HIV (all blood donations are) why the fuck are homosexuals discriminated against over this.
We can reliably screen for HIV (all blood donations are) why the fuck are homosexuals discriminated against over this.
except that the tests are (per cdc) up to 90 days late in detection. So you may get infected and spend 3 months testing negative.
And judging by OPs being german, where the rule (admittedly only since 2021) is “you may only have fucked one guy for the last 4 months”, this seems like being on the safe side, but not completely excessive to me.
bigotry exists in all forms; but it’s only the kind expressed by the uneducated & poor that gets rebuke and this one has been committed in plain sight since the 1980’s by the wealthy and educated.
Do they not just… test the blood before they use it anyway? You’d think they’d want to do that regardless
They do, but HIV infections can take a while to turn up positive while already being transmittable.
In addition to what @LwL said - It has to do with how testing is done, and that some diseases can’t really be tested for. It is quite expensive, and is generally done on small samples from lots of people mixed together. If it is positive they split the batch and test again (look up binary search).
The lower the incidence rate of diseases, the larger batches can be done. Ditching certain denographics with significantly higher risks for certain diseases can make testing orders of magnitudes cheaper and faster. (Other groups, at least where I live, include people who recently changed partner, recently went abroad, have ever gotten a blood transfusion, have gone through a recent surgery, have recently been sick, etc. etc.)
tests have been available since the 1980’s; they just don’t want gays there.
That’s the worst thing. At this point, they shouldn’t even be allowed to even ask that
Which is fucking hilarious at this point since the overwhelming AIDS demographic is the straights
i bet that the people who made this decision were dealing with the AIDS epidemic
Well, that’s a new thought. Donating blood is necessary, so we get paid by the Red Cross to do it, in money or a small meal. But the Red Cross then immediately upsells that blood to the hospitals that need it. In a sense, we are exploited workers without a contract.
The real reason donating blood is unethical is because we cannot unionize.
I wouldn’t mind it for that reason. The Red Cross do good work that need to be financed.
Here in the Netherlands they do that by contracting out volunteers for first aid services to events like fairs and runs. The volunteer donates their time, gets trained for free, the Red Cross gets paid by the organiser and makes money for their mission and an small army of experienced first aid people and EMTs to help out when disaster strikes.
I’m such a volunteer and it’s a great distraction from my normal job. I also get to use my skills outside of the Red Cross, e.g. as an action medic at protests.
Cool sidenote: there’s this network any CPR certified person can join to get alerted by emergency dispatch when CPR is needed close to your home or work. This has helped massively to get CPR started within 6 minutes mostly anywhere in the country, even when ambulances can’t get there that quickly.
Blood is just as bad, but yes, the markup is insane in the US, compared to the machinery and time to collect plasma.
Blood, for instance gets sold by the red cross to hospitals for around $215 per unit. Hospitals in turn will charge anywhere from $580 to $3,000 for it.
Also, most blood is used for elective surgeries that are not life critical. Any time you hear about their being a blood shortage that could effect what hospitals can give, what they actually mean is that there’s plenty for emergency and necessary use, but they may have to postpone elective and cosmetic surgeries.
Obviously, the issue would be solved easily by paying people enough to be worth it to donate. People would be lining up if they got something like $100 to donate a pint. Something that only takes about 30 minutes to do.
Worth remembering that a lot of serious life-changing surgeries are ‘elective’
By which i mean shit like joint reconstruction, endometriosis removal, ear grommets, cataract removal, etc.
Yes, but no one dies if they get pushed back 2 weeks. Also, the cosmetic surgeries are first on the chopping block.
And again, it’s supply and demand. The hospitals want the profit. They don’t want to pay any overhead for the product.
Actually people notoriously do end up becoming critically comorbid due to blown out waiting lines for elective surgeries
If your blood plasma helps save somebody’s life, either directly as an infusion or indirectly in research, that’s not a scam. The monetary reward is compensation for time and an incentive to try to meet demand. The donation is free, but the time and energy required to make the donation are an expense. That’s what the compensation covers. It’s only a scam if your donation goes to feed a literal or wannabe vampire or their bathing fetish.
Yeah, but it can still be exploitation even if it’s not a scam. I don’t know near enough to say it is, just that it could be.
I think the larger issue is that the blood supply is for profit in the US. Everyone is getting exploited, including the people that require the transfusion.
I donate regularly in Canada and give it away for free as does everyone else. I don’t donate plasma because it’s not especially useful with my blood type (AB+ is universal for plasma, O- for other products).
I’m just surprised there isn’t a shadow industry of selling blood products fed on people altruistically donating for free (like, as far as I can tell, every country with public healthcare does) with corrupt pseudo-legal marketing ensuring that blood products are not sold for profit (because they sell the bag, not the blood, or they sell the service of delivering blood, or some bullshit like that)
The US has laws that bans paying for blood, but they can pay for plasma. All healthcare in the US is a for profit venture.
If you donate blood in the US, you are the only one in that process who is making a donation. Every other organization in the chain between your donation and the patient who receives it will add a markup for their own profit.
Organ donations work the same way. If you get killed by a car, and your heart is used to save someone’s life, they will be charged nearly two million dollars for the operation. Not only does your next of kin not get a cut of that two million, your estate will still get a bill for whatever treatment failed to save your life.
I can think of little that is more unethical than being the only one donating. Plasma is better because the donors are paid. If healthcare is for profit, at minimum the profits should go both ways. Plasma is the one time it does.
In the UK it’s illegal to pay blood or plasma donors, and I think the only time we’ve had a shortage is due to a cyber attack.
I think they do give you a medal or something after donating a certain number of times though.
Yeah you get different levels of rewards the more you do it but it’s just stuff like fancy looking member cards, medals and pins
I got a teddy bird and a puzzle! Worth it.
I first started donating blood when I read about shortages, but it turns out that was mostly other blood types. After the entry testing, they recommended me to switch to plasma donations because my blood type was common enough that they’d probably never need my full blood.
If you have a relatively rare blood type, you may be able to help people even if they have enough blood to help most people.
You can donate blood in 20 minutes. It takes an hour plus to donate plasma
Am I going to sit in a chair for an hour plus without any compensation? Maybe once or twice here and there. But you can donate plasma at least twice a week.
It requires two donations for a single unit. If you donate once and don’t donate the second, then your first donation is unusable. You have to get them to donate twice.
When I was donating plasma, it paid about $75 for each donation. 50 first, 100 for second. The money is pretty good. $300 a month is a lot for a lot of people.
If you didn’t compensate people for plasma donations, a lot wouldn’t do it. They currently need more people to donate.
Plasma “donation” is a good thing.
I do in fact sit down for an hour once or twice a month to give plasma without compensation and many other people do so as well, given that it’s illegal to be paid for blood or plasma here in the Netherlands, but I can see why paying people a bit would help.
The reason people can’t get paid for it here is to avoid perverse incentives, mainly people donating when they shouldn’t, lying on the form or to the doctor to pass the pre-donation check.
Donating blood plasma is good as it helps people in need. Sure, it sucks that there is a company in the middle making a profit, but not donating is not the solution to that problem, as it hurts the people in need more than the corporation in the middle.
I think its kinda similar to the tipping situation. Yes it sucks that restaurants don’t pay their employees properly and that you have to tip to support the employees. But not tipping hurts the employees rather than the restaurant owner.
In both cases, if we want change, we need to change the legislation.
