I had my my eight-week pint o’ blood donation today. I was never a regular donor before my mid-thirties. In February of 2015, my wife at the time, Shannon, went into the hospital (you can read all about her story on her blog) and used five pints of blood and plasma to keep her alive while she was bleeding out from the inside because they’d added a MEK inhibitor to her cancer treatment that week. That’s when I decided I at least owed the world that blood back. I’ve been a regular donor since and I’ve now got several gallons in my donation history.
Being O-negative (the universal donor), basically means that my red blood cells don’t have any of the major antigens (identification molecules) on their surface. This means that if my blood is used in another person that my blood cells won’t be marked as a foreign invader and attacked by their immune system. They don’t let me go long without regular reminders to donate because of this. Yay for saving lives! Learn more about blood type here!
I’ve noticed the last couple of times (since the COVID epidemic started) that the donation center is a lot busier than it usually is. Last time, I thought maybe it was because people had put off donating and now there was an influx of regular donors trying to get in, but this time the reason was more obvious. Free COVID antibody tests with donation… A little personal incentive can go a long way to increase availability.
Now I didn’t become a regular donor out of the goodness of my heart. I did it because I felt I had a debt to society because the blood that was available saved someone I loved. Donating blood isn’t pleasant, it generally leaves me depleted for the day and impacts my cardiovascular activites for a week or so, and all I get out of it is a cookie and occasionally a coupon for a beer or a fast food meal. So why keep doing it now that my “debt” is paid? I don’t know who will end up using the blood I donate, but I’d rather it be available to save someone. I choose to consider the best scenarios (a person needs the blood because of something that happened that had nothing to do with their own decisions) like a kid in a car accident, instead of a negative scenario like a drunk driver. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up with my blood. Consider the following for the recipient…
There’s another side of blood donation that I want to mention because I have some perspective. When Shannon got those transfusions, I got the bill a couple months later. A close inspection of the all the itemized costs showed that the total cost for just the transfusion portion of her stay was just over $100,000… that’s $20,000 per pint on the other end… from what was given freely. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have to pay that bill, or many of the others that had come over the years that Shannon was getting treated. (Some perspective, the total billed costs were in excess of a million dollars…!) Why not? Because I was fortunate enough to have good health insurance. Without it, I would be destitute right now.
Even more perspective? The negotiated portion of that section of the bill paid by Kaiser (my insurer) was around $8,000. About $1600 per pint. This seems a reasonable cost given the price of the infrastructure for drawing, testing, storing, and transfusing the actual blood. That suggests that the inflation of the value of the service was more than a factor of ten than what was really “needed” by the hospital to cover the costs. Something is wrong with the system when the regular folks pay that much more. Why are our healthcare costs so bloated? How would an uninsured person have dealt with this situation? If one non-profit organization was responsible for this system, we could probably get the costs down to less than $1000 per pint donor to recipient. This is why healthcare is a basic service that should be provided to all people by the government. You shouldn’t be able to profit at every level on the misfortunes and suffering of people. People have a right to not have to worry about whether going to get care will leave them destitute to pad the pockets of the rich. And yes, that would require paying more in taxes. Maybe you could consider the amount you pay extra in taxes to be to cover your extended family when they get hurt. See, I didn’t stay out of politics for even a single post. This isn’t at all where I expected this post to go when I started, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this in the future…
Szience.com 