I’ve been a blood donor for most of my adult life, and have donated about 30 liters. Where I’m at you get a token donation and a thanks for donating, but someone mentioned that in the US you get paid quite a lot depending on the quality and the blood type.
I have a fairly uncommon blood type (about 10% of the population) and a blood count of around 150.
So, how wealthy would I have been if I had donated my blood in the US instead?
You’re thinking of plasma, people can get paid for that. Donating blood just gets you a cookie, the satisfaction of helping people in need, and a sticker.
Yeah. The motivation was never money. I was just curious since I heard that you got paid in the US. Apparently I was misinformed.
Where I live, the places that do blood donations, also do plasma donations. The process is longer, but is otherwise a similar experience. And since plasma is extracted from blood, it is not entirely wrong to argue that people can get paid for blood donations in the US. It is not accurate, but I would argue the statement is probably based on a truth.
The process might be similar on the withdrawal side, but they are used for very different things. Blood is used to replenish the blood of someone undergoing surgery or who was injured or whatever. Plasma is not given to people. It’s used to make pharmaceutical products primarily. So it’s the difference that one is a necessity to modern medicine and a hell of a lot of it is needed or people will definitely die and much of modern surgery wouldn’t be possible. The other is an ingredient for for-profit products.
For whole blood, I’ve only ever been given a t-shirt. For plasma alone though, it was purely dependent on your weight and, therefore, how much they can take from you in the one session. I’m a tiny dude who barely weighed enough to qualify and got about $80 a couple years ago. It’s honestly not worth it at all, but if you’re broke it’s easier than many other options. The place was full of the “undesirables” of society because of that. It drained me emotionally, seeing how blatantly exploitative it is.
Edit to add: these plasma donations can be done with a tighter window between them too, so the people who were always short on cash were in there every 2 weeks.
Edit again: I forgot that that was an introductory deal where they give you an extra $40, so it was actually $40 for me. Overweight patients could get around $70-$80.
Thanks for the answer. So, not wealthy at all then. Good to know.
Fun fact, whenever my blood gets used to help someone, I get a text message telling me, and a thanks. Enormously satisfying.
Considering the super shady practices involved with plasma “donation”, and the fact that it’s used to make very expensive cancer drugs, take your text and good vibes. That’s literally the better outcome.
Most of the world won’t even buy US plasma because of the really lax collection regulations and super sus conditions of most of the plasma centers (basically the fact that it’s paid and on such short turnaround causes a lot of people to game the system, it’s dangerous, and potentially unsanitary/risky.)
What they mentioned is unusual. I’m sure some people somewhere pay, but it’s against the norm and even against the rules. Some of us have to fight for even just the anonymity to be dropped.
Hospitals won’t accept paid blood transfusions, but there are two paid markets for what they CALL donations but are sales.
If this person was talking about paid transfusions there’s a subset of parasite that literally just pays young people for elective red cell transfusions. This was actually a plot point in Silicon Valley and it wasn’t a bad depiction of the relationship. Basically, it makes the recipient feel a little more energetic because that’s literally how blood transfusions work, but these old leeches think there’s something special about it
The other is just paid plasma. It’s got a lot of use in industry but regular apheresis is both time consuming and much more risky than they pretend, so they have to offer financial incentives. This blood (plasma) is NOT transfused directly, it is used in various industries for anything from hemophilia treatments to makeup.
Direct transfusions have a higher risk to the recipient so accepting paid transfusions is just not worth it if you have any choice at all, and the nature of paid plasma products demonstrates quite readily why it’s an unacceptable risk, even with improved testing. Hemophiliacs were actually the highest risk group during the AIDs crisis by 3x the rate of gay men. You simply cannot trust people to be safe with other people’s health when money is involved.
Don’t think too much about the implications for for-profit healthcare as a whole.
Because then people who urgently need money do everything to get that money.
E.g. lie in that questionnaire. And you know who needs a lot of money? Intravenous drug users. Who tend to share needles. And have a higher risk of high risk sexual behaviour (both from prostitution itself but also rape, infections in their mucosal areas,etc)
Like the others I’ve only seen pay for blood plasma, not whole blood. Whole blood gets you a cookie, sometimes a sticker or a T-shirt, or once I got a $15 gift card but I’m pretty sure that was from the company sponsoring the charity blood drive and not the Red Cross who was collecting the blood.
And pay for plasma isn’t a lot, like $30 a donation, 1-2 donations per week. You get more working a single shift at a fast food restaurant. Plasma also takes longer to donate than whole blood because you have to sit there while the plasma is separated out and the remainder pumped back into you.
So the answer is: not rich at all.
At least that’s good. Keeps the wrong people from donating. Thanks for your answer.
Wonder if they could save some time and not put the rest back, just give it to a zoo to feed vampire bats or something… 🤔
They’d get less plasma. Putting the non-plasma portion back in what enables people to donate/sell plasma a couple times a week versus ~monthly or less if donating whole blood.
Also, we finally have the vampire bat population under control. We can’t be feeding them that much blood, their strength will return and we’ll be right back to the dark vampiric ages.
I’ve only donated a few times but from what I recall you can donate blood or sell plasma. Always struck me as weird but the difference is that they use the whole blood medically while the plasma only is used for research or commercial purposes. We do love to make a market for near everything possible here.
As for how much, not sure exactly since I haven’t done so myself but I get the impression it’s not huge, maybe $20-$50 each time.
