Blood money

Have I mentioned how I hate blood drives? Well I do. The Red Cross collects the blood. They claim that the price they charge hospitals for the blood only covers their costs, as if we should believe them or something. The hospital then charges about 200 dollars per unit of blood (depending on where you live) and says that half of that is their cost (to the Red Cross) and half is for labor. I don't know if it actually costs them 100 dollars (storage, delivery, the nurse who hooks it up) but I guess it's possible. The point is that the Red Cross gets 100 dollars for every unit of blood they sell to a hospital. From what I can gather, there are about 14 million units of blood used by hospitals per year, and half of those come from the Red Cross.

7.5 million units x 100 dollars is 750 million dollars. Does it cost 750 million dollars a year to collect, store, and transport blood (the people who collect it are volunteers btw). Their costs are needles, tubes, some medical equipment like blood pressure monitors, refrigerated trucks and refrigerators, oh and cookies. Those are expensive. They also have to test the blood for various communicable diseases which they claim costs 25 dollars per donation or something like that.

In addition to the amount of money they make off just the blood, they also sell the plasma, platelets, etc. Who knows how much they actually make off of your donation. Anyway, this is all the WHO's fault because they recommend that countries go to a 100% donated standard. This will somehow magically eliminate bad blood from the pool because only sleazeballs with AIDS want to be paid for their blood. Pure Christian blood comes from those with generous hearts who do it for Jesus.

Actually that's a good slogan for a blood drive. Jesus shed his blood for you, surely you can donate yours! Ugh. I hate the concept of giving away something like my blood. It's mine goddamn it! If there's anything I can say I really created, it's my blood. I'm not giving to anyone I don't know and certainly not for free. If the Red Cross didn't have so many do-gooders rolling up their shirtsleeves, they would pay for it.