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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How could selling something you naturally produce be a scam? I can see how easily you could get ripped off on the price, but in the end you’re still making money and automatically replacing the plasma lost. Even if they’re not actually using the plasma for their stated purpose, I’d still argue the donator is not the one getting scammed. I guess it really comes down to your definition of “scam”.
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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.
I donated blood for many years, starting the first day I was allowed (mom took me). I’ve been an organ donor from the day I was able and am loud about that. And for a few months after college I sold plasma for money. It definitely felt scummy, but I think it’s ultimately a good thing, though it is selling part of your body to a for profit company at a rate that’s pretty bad. So the cons are really that it definitely feels seedier than whole blood donation and that the phlebotomists are worse. I can’t donate blood anymore because they gave me a track mark and I can’t risk my other elbow’s veinous access.
But it got me through a rough time
how much did they ngive you?
Something like $100/week for two draws. But it was like 6 years ago in Kentucky
not bad
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.
The only way you’re getting blood out of me for any reason other than medical purposes is if you pay me or commit a crime. That goes for the plasma too.
That’s a terrible sword to live by. How do you expect to get blood, then? If you’re unconscious you can’t take it by force.
I’m not allowed to give blood since I’m gay and have an active sex life
Which is fucking hilarious at this point since the overwhelming AIDS demographic is the straights
Blatantly false. “MSM [men who have sex with men] accounted for 67% (21,400) of the 31,800 estimated new HIV infections in 2022 and 87% of estimated infections among all males.”
When you consider that gay and bisexual men make up a small percentage of the overall population–under 5%–the fact that gay and bisexual men account for 87% of all HIV infections in men tells you just how alarming this is.
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.
That’s the worst thing. At this point, they shouldn’t even be allowed to even ask that
Do they not just… test the blood before they use it anyway? You’d think they’d want to do that regardless
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.)
They do, but HIV infections can take a while to turn up positive while already being transmittable.
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.
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.
When people start getting paid for their blood, overall quality of the blood in such country suffers.
Because less rich and more poor people start donating blood. Due to how much health correlates with social status and money.
The mere existence of such buying blood organization has such effect on a whole country.
In my country you can only donate blood for free. But however for your charity government pays you a meal and day of work.
This “compensation” must be low enough and presented in a way people still consider it a charity. Otherwise it has described effect, and people who actually donate blood feel cheated. Also in my country healthcare is “free” and you can receive blood for “free” which seems “fair” to a person who is donating blood.
Source: a book “things you cannot buy with money”
Maybe it should be like other charitable donations and there should be a set tax deduction per ml or better yet how about they take enough for donation and decanter a portion out an do blood testing both to make sure the blood is clean but alsoso the individual is aware of they are free of X. You could get like a qr code you can use to identify the results later.
I think paying for blood or other bodily fluids is bad. It provides incentive for desperate people (addicts etc.) to lie on the safety forms to keep getting paid.
I know a few people who donate blood despite not getting anything in return. I personally stopped donating plasma after a few times for health reasons (nothing dangerous in the plasma itself, luckily). To me, being able to help a hospital or a person by simply sitting back and watching shows on my tablet is probably the easiest, laziest charity you can support. The snacks are nice, too.
Not everyone can donate blood, but everyone who is able to, you should consider it, even if you won’t get paid for it. You can doom scroll and browse Lemmy like normal, except you’re sitting in a weird chair and get free food.
I suppose in the shittier countries, where all blood donation stuff is run for-profit, you should let them pay you if they’re making a profit off of you, but I still think it brings a bad incentive.
In germany - I think - blood and plasma donations are most commonly done with the DRK (German Red Cross). I might be wrong, but DRK is not a for profit organization, but “gemeinnützig”. Organizations with that status get controlled by the government for it, so they are non-profit. I think the 25€ are an incentive to come and donate, just as the chocolate and drinks and the small goodies, that you get there. And you only can get the money, if you go to one of the fixed DRK locations. If the DRK comes to somewhere near you (as they often do with churches, town halls, schools and universities) you don’t get any money. I can at least believe, that these two are monetarily similar for the DRK. If you come to them, they don’t need to pay for getting the equipment and people to you. And providing incentives for donating blood is in effect a good thing, as they are working, thus we have more blood to save lifes.
Ofcourse actors later in the chain are probably profit oriented. Though there I would see the discussion disconnected from the donation. It is more about if we want profit oriented actors in healthcare.
And - as always - the US healthcare system seems to do the worst thing possible every time. Sorry, americans, don’t want to bash you, but capitalism…
U.S. here. I “donate” blood regularly to Vitalant. I enjoy the way they do it. You get “points” or often something free for donating (shirts, your name in their sweepstakes to win something large, etc.). You can use the points to redeem gift cards or choose to “donate” the gift card amount back to the organization.
My thoughts: I think these organizations have more donors when they offer compensation, even small vs if they did not. I saw Red Cross offer a chance to win a PS5 once and I’m quite sure it caught some peoples attention and earned them more first time donors -> potential long-term donors.
If it’s an adult doing the selling, then it’s a consensual interaction.
Exploitation in the negative sense requires a violation of consent.
youguysgetpaid.jpg ?
Here if you go donate you get a sandwich and a day off work
You guys get a day off? All we get is time off to donate (also as many cookies and drinks as you want within reason, of course.
TBH most people I know don’t actually take the whole day, we’ve all got too much shit to do at work.
That makes a lot of sense.
Do you get paid for the work day? I used to donate plasma twice a week because that $240 a month was the only money I had. I stopped because now I don’t need that money and I work too much to have time for it.
If I got a paid day off work for every donation I would be there as often as they let me.
Depending on what you donate, you may have to wait 3 months between one donation and the next, we often donate whole blood; Plasma donations must be at least two weeks apart I think. I’m pretty sure there must be a limit to the numbers of days off you can get. It’s all managed through the national mutual assitance org, the employer must seek reimbursement through them as they would for sick days.
I’m assuming you’re in Germany? So envious of your labor rights there and in the broader EU.
We were allowed to donate plasma eight times per month. $25 first donation of the week $35 second.
Italy, actually. It’s bonkers to me how the labor movement, so strong in the USA at the start of the past century, is so weak nowadays.
For example it’s outrageous to me that you hold voting on a work day while not making it a national holiday or day off of some sort.
The thing about making it a holiday is interesting. Everyone in the service industry would be forced to work, probably extra hours as well. Because here any holiday means people who are lucky enough to be middle class and above will be consuming, especially eating out or ordering food in.
I’d prefer mandatory voting like Australia but with ballots mailed to everyone automatically. Make it as easy as possible.
Idk, we’ve got Ferragosto for example as a national holiday where EVERYTHING is closed…
