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?
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.