If there’s always a HUGE SHORTAGE!!! of blood and every year is a crisis year, it seems that the next step would be to start paying people for their blood. My girlfriend sells her blood plasma twice per week for about $60, and it’s not all that different from giving blood except the needle is longer and it takes about an hour.
I know that would raise the cost of blood transfusions, but they’re already outrageously expensive, and would an extra $20/bag really make that big of a difference?
Come on, there’s got to be some reason they aren’t paying me for my blood.
I am aware that there are some places that will pay for your blood, but I imagine there are some problems with this. The Red Cross makes you wait 8 weeks between donations. If people were getting paid, surely some people would be tempted to donate more often than would be good for their own health. (I don’t know why you can sell plasma so frequently, however.)
Secondly, the floodgates would open for, say, drug addicts who are desperate for money, a group with a very high risk of bloodborn diseases. The Red Cross sez:
However, I do not know why this is not a problem with plasma.
Right now it depends on the efforts of altruistic donors who are motivated enough to follow the rules and exclude themselves if they’ve donated too recently or too often or if they do seem to fall into a higher-risk group on the screening questions. (And perhaps we can avoid arguing about who should be allowed to donate blood but isn’t; there was a nice thread about that recently).
But if one pays the donor, suddenly you’ve created an attractive activity for people who aren’t so altruistically motivated, and who will be more willing to lie about past histories.
The end result would be more transmission of blood-borne pathogens (HIV, Hepatitis B & C chiefly) to patients receiving the blood product.
This is less important for plasma donors, because risks of transmission are far less for that product.
At least that’s how I recall being educated about it by a blood bank pathologist a few years back.
You can donate blood plasma more because they only remove the plasma and leave the red blood cells. There is a machine which removes, say, a pint of blood, filters it, then puts it back in your body. Repeat a few times.
People are willing to do things in order to feel good about themselves that they aren’t willing to do for money. Lots of people who hate needles will suck it up and donate blood anyway because it’s seen as an admirable, altruistic thing to do, something that you can’t assign a monetary value to. But they sure as hell wouldn’t do it just to get $20.
This past summer when I worked in Florida I sold some blood plasma. I got $30 but it felt kind of dirty, I would almost have rather donated and I have before but I needed some money. The people I saw donating blood were some pretty scary characters. A lot of them “looked” like they were not unaccustomed to taking some drugs here and there.
When I donate blood, I notice that it is clearly marked “Voluntary Donation”. I have no doubt that it is marked that way because it is considered safer (although they did give out $5 starbucks gift cards). My WAG is that they use voluntary donations first and go into the paid stuff only when they have to.
Considering all the hoops the Red Cross makes me jump through every 8 weeks just so I can donate blood (inconvenient hours, that damn questionnaire every damn time, that sort of thing), I really wish they would pay me.
Don’t get me wrong- I love donating blood. I just liked it a lot more back in Austin, when I could go whenever it was convenient for me. Here, they’re not open on the weekends or in the evening, so I have to take time off from work to donate.
I am deathly afraid of needles. I don’t know if I would donate if it was pitched to me as: “Hey, wanna make some quick cash?” However, when it is pitched as: “How about saving a life?” I feel a more of a desire to do so.
I worked with a woman who had a daughter. She was dating a guy. I asked if he worked (since he was a student). She said, “Well, I guess you could say he has a job. He’s a sperm donor.”
Back in the day, it was common for people to sell blood. Students did, but so did alcoholics. It wasn’t all that rare to hear about guys who had staggered out of a bar to try to find a quick way to get a few dollars, so that they could go back in. I don’t know if the blood banks actually accepted as donors people who appeared to be drunk. But blood donation centers and skid rows were often close to one another.
They discuss this a bit in Freakanomics as an example of non-monetary motivations and unintended consequences. Another example: A day care center is tired of parents being late to pick up their kids. They think they can solve the problem by charging a couple of bucks to parents who are late. The result: way more leftover kids. The parents used to feel bad about being late, but now the guilt was gone, they felt like they were paying for the right to leave the kid, so there was no reason to rush.
Safety issues aside, there is no doubt you could get more blood by paying for it, but you might have to offer quite a bit more than you think to actually to increase supply.
Here’s a question – isn’t it illegal to sell body parts? Does blood/plasma not count? I know I can’t put a kidney up for auction, so why can I sell my plasma?