Maybe if our healthcare industry wasn’t designed to profit capitalists off death and suffering, there would be no such shortage.
I say this as someone who used to donate regularly until I learned how my donated blood was then being ransomed for private profit against sick people that need it.
I won’t knowingly support such a system, where genuine charity (not that shit corporations do for tax breaks and marketing, that’s called a transaction) is bastardized and betrayed into serving the profit motive.
You can try cutting out the middle man and donate to a hospital. I know UCSF has their own blood collection, many other hospitals should be the same
The system is fucked, yes. But the solution isn’t to stop donating. Doing that reduces supply and exacerbates the exact problems you’re describing.
Ransomed? I hadn’t heard about this so I checked and found that places like Red Cross sell the blood for roughly $250 per unit to hospitals in the US, which seems…perfectly reasonable within the parameters of our healthcare system. There are operational costs to collecting blood that have to be funded somehow.
The cost to patients charged by healthcare providers is unrelated, and this does not apply to for-profit plasma centers, which…yeah, don’t do that.
The cost to patients charged by healthcare providers is unrelated
The next link in the donation delivery chain is unrelated? Agree to disagree.
Capitalist Trojan horse Charter schools might be “non-profit” but they hire publically traded, for profit charter management companies. It’s all a capitalist profit grift by design. Pretty but fake front-end hiding a greed driven backend.
The next link in the donation delivery chain is unrelated? Agree to disagree.
Forgive me, but this is misguidedly reductive. No healthcare is provided in the US, by providers, without being subjected to capitalist exploitation. If I understand your thought process, a collective of the best pharmaceutical scientists in the world could create a completely non-profit pharmaceutical NGO, design and manufacture life-saving drugs, and give them away to hospitals (or sell them at-cost). But so long as hospitals then charge profit rates for those drugs, it would be ethically indefensible to financially support the NGO?
Is that not holding patients hostage in an impotent effort to force change in the broader healthcare industry? I donate to my local non-profit blood center, who (assuming they’re similar to ARC) sells my blood to local hospitals at-cost, and then my blood is used to save a patient in need. The patient will then be responsible for paying the hospital exorbitant sums for my blood (from which the blood center doesn’t benefit) and all the other services it provides, but what’s the alternative?
Edit: would it make a difference if the blood center didn’t charge hospitals for the blood, even though the hospital will still charge patients?
Blood transfusions cost a patient $1k-$4k and none of that money is given back to a donor. If they want people to donate, they need to either make transfusions cheap, or pay the donors.
Do you think it is Red Cross that is charging for transfusions?
There’s plenty of reasons to dislike the ARC, but this isn’t one of them.
Hell, if you’d stopped to think for half a second you’d realize all that will do is increase patient costs and endanger the blood supply.
You think paying donorsproviders would reduce the number of people willing to givesell blood?
No. I think you’d rapidly find yourself in a situation like in West Africa, where the blood sellers typically have 3x the rate of having a blood born illness than the general population.
There is one thing countries that refuse paid transfusables have in common, and that is a near-zero infection risk from blood transfusion. Something that is not true for countries that accept paid “donors.”
And the dumbest thing of it all is it still wouldn’t reduce costs. It would increase them for patients, so why the hell do it at all?
The problem is not that “donors” aren’t getting a cut. The problem is the boomers are the last generation that got massive public awareness campaigns about the importance of donating blood, and they’re aging out of the health requirements or just, you know, dying.
What is the relevant difference between unpaid whole blood donation and paid plasma donation?
I would argue that the price of blood is inflated due to low supply. Increasing the supply by paying blood donors could very well reduce the unit price of blood, and thus patient costs.
I reject your insinuation that paying people for donating blood poses a threat to the blood supply. The risks to human life posed by an insufficient blood supply are far greater than the risks arising from compensating donors.
Your uninformed opinion on proven medical fact is irrelevant, especially when you don’t even know that paid plasma isn’t directly transfused into patients, unlike actual donated plasma, and you think there’s supply and demand in action for fucking blood transfusions.
Paid plasma is used for the manufacture of various products, anything from makeup to clotting factors. Which, as it happens, are notable for being an increased infection risk over directly transfused blood because their sources can’t be trusted to tell the truth about their risk factors.
I recently needed a blood transfusion. The bill was $7,300. I paid $650 after insurance covered/negotiated the rest.
Just sharing a data point.
I am a blood donor and a future organ donor. More than anything I am frustrated that someone should have to even be billed for $7,300 for something I gave to them for free. Our health system is rigged against the people it claims to benefit.
It is frustrating and needs to be better regulated, but thank you for being a donor.
As someone with chronic anemia, it’s very disheartening to see all of these people say that they will not donate because their donation gets sold. They would rather people like me just die than have capitalism get involved with their donation?
I’d rather pay than not get the blood, thank you very much. The solution is legislation, not to simply stop donating.
Don’t they just sell most of what’s donated?
