Wondering this as well. I used to donate blood, but why do it for free when technically speaking hospitals generate revenue off my blood? How hard would it be really to incentivize me to show up and compensate me for my time, after all, the doctors, nurses, etc who are handling our blood wouldn't do it for free so why should I?
This always rubbed me the wrong way. Remember back in the day Red Cross doing this and this was before Haiti scandal.
Could be a decent business to pay x amount for people to donate blood and sell it to hospital. People would be incentivised to donate blood, hospital would get more off it and given they are already paying for it.
I've also felt annoyed about the dishonesty of the blood donation market but that makes actually "some" sense. then again they should just register donors and extensively check them plus paying. then everybody wins.
> then again they should just register donors and extensively check them plus paying. then everybody wins.
That probably won't work. You want donors to voluntarily disqualify themselves when they become ineligible (like if they've started taking a prohibited mediation), and they're going to be less likely to do that if they're coming in to get paid. You can't monitor their lives 100% and I doubt it's practical to run screening tests for every problem.
To use a software analogy: it's defense in depth strategy. Their polices screen for honesty, and then they do technical screening as a further check. Neither's perfect, but together they're probably more effective than either alone.
