Asklemmy

43893 readers

785 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

156

What's your stance on "donating" blood plasma? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 2 months ago by v4ld1z@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

109 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've had a little of a debate with a commenter recently where they've argued that "donating" (selling, in their words, because you can get money for it) your blood plasma is a scam because it's for-profit and you're being exploited.

Now, I only have my German lense to look at this, but I've been under the impression that donating blood, plasma, thrombocytes, bone marrow, whatever, is a good thing because you can help an individual in need. I get that, in the case of blood plasma, the companies paying people for their donations must make some kind of profit off that, else they wouldn't be able to afford paying around 25€ per donation. But I'm not sure if I'd call that a scam. People are all-around, usually, too selfish and self-centered to do things out of the goodness of their hearts, so offering some form of compensation seems like a good idea to me.

In the past, I've had my local hospital call me asking for a blood donation, for example, because of an upcoming surgery of a hospitalised kid that shares my blood group. I got money for that too.

What are your guys' thoughts on the matter? Should it be on donation-basis only and cut out all incentives - monetary or otherwise? Is it fine to get some form of compensation for the donation?

Very curious to see what you think

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Sludgeyy@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You can donate blood in 20 minutes. It takes an hour plus to donate plasma

Am I going to sit in a chair for an hour plus without any compensation? Maybe once or twice here and there. But you can donate plasma at least twice a week.

It requires two donations for a single unit. If you donate once and don't donate the second, then your first donation is unusable. You have to get them to donate twice.

When I was donating plasma, it paid about $75 for each donation. 50 first, 100 for second. The money is pretty good. $300 a month is a lot for a lot of people.

If you didn't compensate people for plasma donations, a lot wouldn't do it. They currently need more people to donate.

Plasma "donation" is a good thing.

[–] sjmulder@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 months ago

I do in fact sit down for an hour once or twice a month to give plasma without compensation and many other people do so as well, given that it’s illegal to be paid for blood or plasma here in the Netherlands, but I can see why paying people a bit would help.

The reason people can’t get paid for it here is to avoid perverse incentives, mainly people donating when they shouldn’t, lying on the form or to the doctor to pass the pre-donation check.