ROTFLMAO … that table pounding award from reddit and all
mrAru is O neg, I am AB neg, they absolutely adored us when we were able to donate blood. We are now unfortunantely medically barred from donating sigh And I was short of my 10 gallon mark by ONE damned pint =(
Let’s refocus the discussion.
I stand corrected on the difference between whole blood and plasma.
Forget about the union, this was just hypothetical to begin with.
I was simply comparing what labor unions accomplish and correct once they are formed. This includes better working conditions and fair wages for the workers, which simply translates into higher pay.
And I apologize if the title of this thread rubbed anyone the wrong way. I did not intend to come accross as callous or insensitive to anyone who has had a friend or a loved one who’s life was either saved or lost during a surgery or blood transfusion.
A more appropriate title for this thread should simply be should people be payed for donating blood, and if so, how much?
I don’t believe that people who donate whole blood, especially those who donate on a regular basis,
should do so without fair and just compensation.
This is because blood us valuable, and sometimes the supply cannot keep up with the demand.
This can actually lead to death for some patients.
Does anyone remember that TV commercial some time back with the father who was on a busy sidewalk pleading with all the passers by to donate their blood because his young child needed it?
As I mentioned before, blood donors are part of a metaphorical food chain that includes doctors, nurses, medical workers, and companies that manufacture and sell medical devices, equipment, and supplies used during blood transfusions and emergency surgeries where significant blood loss has to be replaced.
The point here is:
Doctors do not work for free.
Nurses do not work for free.
Companies that manufacture medical devices, equipment, and supplies that doctors and nurses use in these procedures are not just given away for free.
But the people who actually provide the blood for these procedures are expected to do this for free.
I believe every participant in this food chain are of equal importance.
So, in order to deal with blood shortages, more people need to donate blood more often. And the way to get this done is to offer an incentive. This incintive would be to offer substantial pay.
So in conclusion, wether you think blood donors should be payed or not, at the end of the day, everyone including myself wants the same thing.
That is to save as many lives as possible.
I’d like to see documentation of “doctors, nurses and other medical staff” supposedly profiting off blood donations.
According to one source, Red Cross blood center staff pay runs from about $13 an hour to $27 an hour, which doesn’t exactly sound like blood money. And apart from senior execs, docs and nurses don’t seem to be earning enormous salaries.
This article explains that monetary incentives for blood donation may increase the risk of people lying about pre-existing conditions (plasma pay is less of a problem because plasma is typically processed into components instead of directly infused*, and that processing kills disease organisms.
*exceptions include fresh frozen plasma transfusion which still carries a risk, albeit low, of disease transmission.
I have a technical question about blood plasma:
I worked as a phlebotomist in a laboratory at a medical clinic, and the procedure for extracting plasma from the red blood cells begins with drawing whole blood from the patient first.
Next, you take the tube of whole blood and you put it in what is called a centrifuge.
A centrifuge then spins around very fast like a top.
The centrifical force literally seperates the plasma from the Red Blood cells.
When you remove the tube from the centrifuge, the Red Blood cells are packed down at the bottom of the tube, and the yellowish clear liquid sitting on top of the Red Blood cells is the plasma that is used to conduct most of the lab tests themselves.
Now, it’s been over 20 years since I have worked as a phlebotomist.
Is it now possible to draw plasma directly from a patient without having to draw the whole blood first?
Did you notice post #8 that mentions that unpaid blood donations relying on altruism is a more reliable and safer way to get blood than paying incentives? So, your premise may not be true.
Equating blood donors with doctors, nurses, etc. is a false equivalence, for at least two reasons I can think of:
(1) Doctors spend many years going to school and training to become doctors. When doctors are paid, they are being compensated not just for they hours they spend actually doctoring a patient, but also for their expertise, which comes from putting in many years of time and effort.
Blood donation, by contrast, is completely unskilled. Anyone can do it unless there’s something that rules them out.
(2) Doctoring (nursing, etc.) is a career. Doctors can’t do all their work for free because, unless they’re independently wealthy, they have to earn a living. But no one earns a living as a blood donor.
Iam going to have to research the definition of the word Altruism before I reply to that post.
When it comes to blood donation, in my opinion, there seems to be this unbreakable mindset that if anyone who donates blood expecting to be paid for it is somehow immoral, and will be criticized for being dispassionate.
With that being said, there is nothing wrong with people who are genuinely charitable and who dedicate their lives to their respective humanitarian cause in the form of their time and money.
Applying concepts of capitalism to the blood doneing industry is not immoral. Capitalism in the blood doner industry simply means people being payed a monitary figure that is fair and equal to the value of the good or service they want to exchange, in this case blood, that everyone knows is valuable.
Capitalism itself has solved a heck of lot more problems in the world than it has created.
From this point, one’s point of view on this issue simply boils down to your political views.
Wether you are a liberal or a conservative, or at any point in between.
The point is, liberals are not wrong in their beliefs that people should not get payed for donating blood, but you will be hard pressed to find a liberal who will admit that conservative views are not wrong either.
So, the main problem is that, in at least some cases/situations, not enough people donate blood to meet the medical need for blood.
A secondary problem is that paying people to donate blood has the unwanted secondary effect of encouraging people who shouldn’t be donating (due to diseases and medical conditions) to attempt to do so, for monetary reasons.
This site says that only 37% of Americans qualify to donate blood, but less than 10% do so at least once a year.
So, the challenge is to convert those who qualify, but never donate, to do so, at least occasionally, and to get the occasional donors to do so more often (my understanding is that, generally, people only can donate whole blood about six times a year).
I do not think that there is that “mindset,” to any great degree. No one here has said that, and I don’t see you providing any cites to back this claim up.
As has been noted upthread, in the U.S., there was a time, decades ago, when people apparently did get paid to donate blood, but that this was discontinued, due to disease issues.
What you seem to be ignoring, and which several people have noted to you in this thread, is that offering cash for blood donations will also have the unwanted side effect of getting people who don’t qualify (due to things like intravenous drug use, disease, etc.), but who are desperate for cash, to donate – this will contaminate the blood supply.
Debatable at best.
I got paid for my blood circa 1979 in Pittsburgh on The Boulevard of the Allies. It was a company that collected blood “for use in research”. I got $20 a pop which was very good at the time. I also sold plasma at Sera-Tech in Oakland on the Pitt campus.
I used two different names so that I could sell whole blood more frequently than they allowed. It was kinda gross because the people selling were typically homeless and smelled bad.
ETA: I never considered what I was doing “donating”, I was selling.
Good point! But the blood doneing industry is safe in most most developed countries.
Wether doners are payed or not should not change the safety protocols that have always been in place here in the United States.
Everyone who donates blood has to have their blood screened to make sure it is safe to be put into another person’s body.
This includes testing for HIV and hepatitis, among other things.
Also, type and cross is very important because putting the wrong blood type into a patient can be harmfull.
Let me tell you about the technicians that work in the blood banks themselves.
I was told by coworkers while I was working in a laboratory, that the blood bank is one of the most sensitive and highly controlled departments in the entire hospital.
While they are working, they were not even allowed to have casual conversations with their coworkers while they were on the job! The only time they were ever allowed to speak was if it was directly job related.
This is because if there is the slightest lapse in concentration and focus, the smallest mistake could be catastrophic for the patients who are going to recieve this blood!
These people who work in blood banks have to be the best and the bightest to even be considered for a job in the blood bank.
Believe it or not, these workers have to pass extensive background checks, and have special security clearances that are not required for most jobs at a hospital!
But it may be ineffective. Have you read the cites that I and others have provided, that say that voluntary donation is the best way of ensuring a safe and consistent supply?
I have never before heard that views on blood donation were correlated with politics. Do you have evidence that it’s conservatives who believe that blood donors should be paid and liberals who believe they should be unpaid?
That screening, while very good, is not perfect.
People with contraindications i.e. transmissible disease and/or high risk status may lie to the blood bank (with higher incentive to do so if $$ is on the line), figuring that there’s no risk to recipients due to testing. But the more such cases there are, the more diseased blood will slip through the cracks.
My idea is that blood donations should be a tax deduction. Donate a pint of blood and you can take two dollars off your taxes. It’s a relatively small sum but it would be an incentive for people; they would now feel that they’re getting a benefit from donating. The loss of tax revenue would be more than balanced by the increased blood supply.
No one should be able to hide a disease they may have in order to donate blood.
Just like blood screening itself, everyone who decides to donate blood should also have a full physical to rule in or out any disease the person may have that is not detectable by the blood screen alone.
And of course, if you have certain disesases, you should not be allowed to give blood, wether you are payed for it or not.
While not a bad idea on its face, this would likely wind up being a disincentive for many people, as it would present another, not insignificant hurdle for potential blood donors. Only about one out of five Americans get a regular or annual physical right now.
I know that some of you are concerned that if giving blood does become lucrative, that it may matriculate into some underground criminal operation akin to organ harvesting and trafficking.
I will admit that this is a good reason to consider not paying people to give blood, but as long as you keep the legal enterprise seperate from the illegal enterprise, donors and recipient’s in the legal enterprise will still be safe wether the doner is payed or not.
No. No one is concerned about that.
We’re concerned that people who shouldn’t donate will be motivated for small amounts of money to make their lives better. Their blood will either:
You’ve taken a real problem (occasional low amounts of blood on hand) and blown it far out of proportion, proposed a solution that has already been considered and discarded for valid reasons that you seem determined to ignore, and further confused the issue by adding several strawman arguments that no one but you seems concerned about.
And the cherry on top is your completely bogus political claim that isn’t even wrong, it’s just nonsense.
Great idea! A tax deduction in this scenario is another form of payment!
But don’t you think it should be more than $2.00?