>>13195828>usually you get paid for donating plasmaWhat's interesting, paying for donating blood or plasma might be actually counterproductive.
That's an old discussion, if donors should get monetary compensation or do it just honorary, but obviously with caloric, and maybe some symbolic compensation.
Funny thing about paying for donations is that at first it makes sense, but there are arguments and even evidence that it might give worse results on the long run. The problem is, in countries where people donate for money, with time, the way people look at donating changes. It's no longer a honorable gesture of good will you can be proud of and tell people about, but a financial transaction. You don't get THAT much money for it, so people from middle class don't have incentive to do it, so it's mostly people from lower classes that donate. In result, people start looking at it as if it was something shameful, that poor people do out of desperation, which keeps middle class away from it. That wouldn't be a problem by itself if the yield was high, but the issue is not everyone is able to donate. You have to be in a perfect health condition, and it strongly correlates with your financial status. So in effect, even though there are more donors in lower classes, their blood gets rejected way more than the blood of people in middle classes.
In countries where you don't get donation money, it becomes kind of a status symbol. Also, if they have public health care, it builds up social bonds, as you can actually feel you're helping the common cause in more way than just donating blood for someone. In mine, you get weavers to sign if you accept the healthcare to sell your blood for purposes other than medical transfusions if they had a surplus (like selling it to other countries, to pharmacies for production of meds or even cosmetics if you agree), and most often people are ok with it because they feel that the money goes into the system anyway.
Also, you can give non-direct monetary incentives targeted more towards middle class - like an additional day off, which people working in government or unionized workplaces often use, tax deductions, civil decorations, as in actual medals you wear on uniform for amount of donated blood, or free public transportation benefits, which works in countries where public transport isn't shunned on and default mode of transport isn't always a car (also, it works for encouraging use of such transport in a kind of a feedback loop)
And in recent years there's another incentive that needs to be talked about more, which is perfect for attracting middle class - the data they collect in process of examining your blood gets logged into a centralized system together with all of your other medical history, which your physicians can have access to if needed, so they can use years of data to help them examine you.
There is data that shows that in effect, countries witch such a system have often a steady surplus in their reserves and are in the group of the global exporters of blood.
The problem with implementing this in the US would be first changing the pilled up bad reputation of donating, second, the people would question (rightfully so) why should they give their blood for free which real value is hundreds of dollars per unit (btw. when donating you only get a fraction of it) to a privatized healthcare
