re: Is giving blood a scam?

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All I know is if not for people giving blood, I'd have been lowered into the grave about this time last year. So I say God bless everyone willing to give blood.

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Really?

Details, please.

I worked for OLOL blood bank in college. They charge for blood when they transfuse it and sell the surplus for a couple hundred a pint (ostensibly to cover their costs). When they had to buy it from for profit blood centers, it costed a lot more than a $150-200.

If less people donated blood and there were shortages, more critical patients would die, so donation helps people. If you want to donate blood, but hate capitalism, avoid donating at Red Cross (or other for profit, non-hospital blood centers) and donate directly to a hospital that has an ER and you at least cut out the middle man and his profit. If you want to take it a step further you can also direct your donation directly to a patient who has used blood and it will knock $ off their medical bill. If you don't know the name of someone that has used blood, ask the donor tech if they'll label it "direct donation" to someone that needs it.

I used to pull up names of people that needed blood and donated blood directly to them as often as my biology would allow. You have to wait 8 weeks between normal donations, but when directing your blood to a specific patient, you only have to wait 3 weeks as long as your HGB tests high enough.

I did it too often and the head nurse banned me from donating for a while, so I created a dummy account in the system and would donate in the name "Hank Hill" when out on blood drives. That account is probably still in the OLOL system.

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I don't know or care how much money is involved in giving blood. All I know is if not for people giving blood, I'd have been lowered into the grave about this time last year. So I say God bless everyone willing to give blood.

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Agreed. My Dad had a colon bleed a few years ago, received 22 units in 3 days and just by a couple hours avoided a resection when the 3rd try with the fix-a-flat finally plugged the leak. It was the end of the 1st week of December that year. Some winos in his area got a nice Xmas bonus for the donations.

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Isn't the Salvation Army better than Goodwill and Red Cross because their CEO doesn't make an insane amount of money

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Doesn't bother me.

FWIW nonprofits can and do make a profit, the term merely refers to the fact that you can't buy stock in them in exchange for a share of profit - there are no stockholder. But they have to be profitable in order to remain solvent. And they can pay their officers whatever it takes to keep them around.

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None of you know what you are talking about. All the blood donation companies are not-for-profits. It's illegal to take donated blood and sell for profit. Plasma centers are a different story. Furthermore, blood donation centers cannot pay for "donations"... also illegal. The reason being, the human blood supply cannot be tainted by high risk populations (junkies and whores).

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1. Not-for-profit does not mean they're working at cost, or that the cost is appropriate. See the Red Cross

2. Change the laws. More blood will be donated if the law is changed so that you can pay for blood donations.

3. You can make it more difficult to donate blood if you are paying people to get consistent donations. Screen people more effectively and you wont have tainted blood from drug users and HIV patients

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ol and you think you know how it works. The blood center I worked for was a non-profit. It's a business dude. I worked in two departments, one of which was distribution so I know they made money based off the enormous invoices. I'm sure the CEO could afford his BMW off of a 40k salary

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I worked in Management at United Blood Services. Of course, you have to pay for educated people to run organizations such as blood banks. They are highly FDA regulated. There are lab med techs, QA types, RN's. You have to pay to employ people. If the CEO has a BMW, what's the surprise. They are still "not for profit". That means you don't distribute profits ti shareholders or an owner.

Get it?

Once you give blood, when it's time to give again, you start getting phone calls begging you to come in and give again. Just like telemarketers.

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There are lab med techs, QA types, RN's. You have to pay to employ people. If the CEO has a BMW, what's the surprise. They are still "not for profit". That means you don't distribute profits ti shareholders or an owner.

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So you admit it yourself? The wages are competitive. No one that works there is doing it "out of the good of their heart". The people working there make a good profit. The profits just are distributed among the executives instead of the shareholders

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Pre-screening relies completely on the donor's honesty. Since they are not paid, donors have little incentive to lie on the donor screening form. If they were paid, the incentive to lie increases, and it would attract drug addicts. Batch testing would be rendered useless and expensive testing would have to be performed on every pint collected. Yes, they'd get more blood, but they would discard more blood and it would be substantially more expensive to the patients. There is no need to go that route, since there is really never a shortage of blood. It just gets moved around from different sources when there is a run on blood in one area.

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That could be worked around to reduce costs. You wouldnt need to individually test each donation, only test each donating person on their first donation, and run batch tests following. But if there's never a shortage of blood then there's no need to change the system