Red Cross facing severe blood shortage
Red Cross facing severe blood shortage
The American Red Cross sounded the alarm Sunday over a severe blood shortage facing the U.S. as the number of donors dropped to the lowest levels in two decades. The Red Cross said in an anno…
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Maybe if our healthcare industry wasn't designed to profit capitalists off death and suffering, there would be no such shortage.
I say this as someone who used to donate regularly until I learned how my donated blood was then being ransomed for private profit against sick people that need it.
I won't knowingly support such a system, where genuine charity (not that shit corporations do for tax breaks and marketing, that's called a transaction) is bastardized and betrayed into serving the profit motive.
You can try cutting out the middle man and donate to a hospital. I know UCSF has their own blood collection, many other hospitals should be the same
The capitalist ransoming is done by the hospital.
Red cross charges $150 a pint to hospitals. Covers overhead and paying staff.
Then the hospital turns around and charges $1,500 for it. A ten fold increase. For nothing.
The system is fucked, yes. But the solution isn't to stop donating. Doing that reduces supply and exacerbates the exact problems you're describing.
If you keep giving into the hostage taker's demands, they'll just keep taking new hostages, and continue to increase their demands over time.
Forever.
Ransomed? I hadn't heard about this so I checked and found that places like Red Cross sell the blood for roughly $250 per unit to hospitals in the US, which seems...perfectly reasonable within the parameters of our healthcare system. There are operational costs to collecting blood that have to be funded somehow.
The cost to patients charged by healthcare providers is unrelated, and this does not apply to for-profit plasma centers, which...yeah, don't do that.
The cost to patients charged by healthcare providers is unrelated
The next link in the donation delivery chain is unrelated? Agree to disagree.
Capitalist Trojan horse Charter schools might be "non-profit" but they hire publically traded, for profit charter management companies. It's all a capitalist profit grift by design. Pretty but fake front-end hiding a greed driven backend.
The next link in the donation delivery chain is unrelated? Agree to disagree.
Forgive me, but this is misguidedly reductive. No healthcare is provided in the US, by providers, without being subjected to capitalist exploitation. If I understand your thought process, a collective of the best pharmaceutical scientists in the world could create a completely non-profit pharmaceutical NGO, design and manufacture life-saving drugs, and give them away to hospitals (or sell them at-cost). But so long as hospitals then charge profit rates for those drugs, it would be ethically indefensible to financially support the NGO?
Is that not holding patients hostage in an impotent effort to force change in the broader healthcare industry? I donate to my local non-profit blood center, who (assuming they're similar to ARC) sells my blood to local hospitals at-cost, and then my blood is used to save a patient in need. The patient will then be responsible for paying the hospital exorbitant sums for my blood (from which the blood center doesn't benefit) and all the other services it provides, but what's the alternative?
Edit: would it make a difference if the blood center didn't charge hospitals for the blood, even though the hospital will still charge patients?
It would be different if my DONATION to a NON-PROFIT was distributed for the cost of retrieval, packaging, and delivery into the patient's IV at cost, as it is a DONATION. No one forces for profit hospitals to jack up the price of the donated blood for private profit, they choose to out of greed. They should be FORCED not to by law.
No healthcare is provided in the US, by providers, without being subjected to capitalist exploitation
Agreed, and I'm forced to participate in capitalist exploitation to subsist in this greedy fucking place at every turn, but I won't be a willing part of their schemes and scams if I am not forced to to survive.
Capitalists see charity and good will as just another vector for their grift. Thats why I donate directly to their victims on street corners now. If they do use it on drugs as so many warn, good, I hope that provides momentary solace for what we their fellow citizens have done to them in the name of "fuck you I got mine."
Seriously, I get it. It's fucking infuriating, but again...what's the alternative? Is there some way in which this moral rigidity is not holding patients hostage in an impotent effort to force change in a broader healthcare industry?
There are alternative and more effective methods of effecting change that don't involve sacrificing life or well-being. I implore anyone who's rightfully disgusted by this reality to grit your teeth and help people however you can, and direct your ire where it's best deserved.
You do realize that gritting our teeth and helping others through the intentional hostage situation of "but you gotta pay the shareholders first to be allowed to do it" is just further prolonging and further entrenching this sick system?
At some point, if the people don't say enough, let it all come crashing down, and rebuild a more equitable system, then our children and our children's children will be even more exploited, more commodified, and more dehumanized.
I'm being the change I want to see in the world by saying e-fucking-nough, you want to squeeze those sick people for their last nickel, do it yourself. My blood won't be your leverage.
This greed disease can cause pain in perpetuity, generationally, or we can let it collapse and endure the pain of reconstruction. There's gonna be a lot of pain, suffering, and unnecessary death either way. But only one has genuine hope in the long term. Nothing will make our current economy more equitable over time. It's going the other way by design. It is working as intended.
At some point, if the people don’t say enough, let it all come crashing down, and rebuild a more equitable system
Who's organizing this? Your withdrawal isn't part of some collective movement, it is solitary and impotent. It is harmful. There's no board room hosting the league of evil medical barons, no agenda item about how Allonzee stopped donating blood so they'd better start taking things seriously. You're not changing anything, and squeezing sick people isn't a necessary step in effecting change anyway.
There's no "we" and there's no collapsing. These systems persist despite your personal rebellion, because they're really good at persisting until faced with overwhelming collective action. Until then, fucking help people.
Sorry friend, it's not really about you. But a lot of good people who care about inequity have let their pride convince them that systems will implode if they personally choose to stop participating in them. That's not how it works. The only people feeling any hurt are the innocents in your own communities.
"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs. They have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting. They know what's good for them."
-George Carlin, from an episode of Politically Incorrect
I'm more than aware we are doomed and we will only continue to live further in service to them until they succeed in destroying the very air we all breath. I can only control myself, not the millions of people that continue to serve them against their own interests. I do what I consider right without hope or expectation of reward in a fully compromised and unethical society.
Based on this conversation, what you consider right has a lot more in common with pride and laziness than it does with moral integrity. You say a lot of revolutionary words about dismantling power structures before finally admitting you're just shrugging your shoulders in your own little corner.