The American Red Cross has declared an emergency blood shortage, saying patients are at risk of not getting lifesaving transfusions.
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Donors are needed now more than ever as the Red Cross faces a national emergency shortage, with the number of donors at a 20-year low. Medical director Dr. Eric Gehrie says the Red Cross has experienced a loss of 300,000 donors since the COVID-19 pandemic alone.
“It means that hospitals will order a certain number of units of blood, and those orders are not being filled fully,” he said. “So hospital blood banks are low on blood.”
Gehrie says the Red Cross supplies about 40% of the nation’s blood supply. He says emptier shelves could force hospitals to make excruciating decisions about which patients are prioritized for blood.
“Doctors have to make choices about which patients can receive a transfusion in a given day,” he says. “Surgeries like heart can be delayed waiting for the available blood to be collected and sent to the hospital.”
The issue is donation centers are shitty, workers are untrained, and corporations make a shit ton of money selling our “donations” while people that get it have to pay.
Kind of sours people on donating.
Last time I gave they went thru the vein, gave me a giant “golf ball” hematoma and then the workers “playfully teased me” it was going to slow.
They shut up pretty quickly when I showed them how fucked up my arm was, took almost two weeks for the bruise to go away.
When I stopped donating, I started getting automated phone calls that stared out with a distraught woman screaming:
Fuck these literal vampire corporations. We need a government donation system where 2-3 middlemen don’t make millions and the people who need the blood don’t have to pay for it.
Man I really want to donate blood and I’ve tried several times. The last time I went they literally stuck the needle in, wiggled it around for a few seconds, pulled it out, and then did the same thing two more times.
They wanted to keep trying. Like do they go to a John Wayne Gacy LARP convention to find these people? I’m sorry to anyone who needs others’ blood to survive, but it’s literal torture.
The most fucked up thing, is the “donation centers” are 100% running a cost/benefit analysis.
They’re trying to zero in on getting just enough blood with the bare minimum expense.
They can afford to have better staff and facilities, and they don’t need to rely on crazy phone calls.
But then they don’t make as much off what people are giving away.
Its bad enough we legitimately can’t trust them when they say there’s an emergency. Maybe hospitals are running low, maybe they just want a little more money this quarter.
Seriously, I’m so done with giving away resources (blood, money, time, anything) to for-profit corporations that are going to sell that shit for thousands/millions of dollars while I go through hell to make it happen. Fuck all of that!
You want to sell my blood? Pay me!
Have you forgotten where you are? We make everything for profit, from your emergency medical care to your child’s education, call that efficiency, and calling for anything not to be poisoned by the profit motive makes you a filthy commie Leninist socialist who loves Venezuela or something.
Greed and greed worship has destroyed us, the accelerating climate change and diminished growth/metastasis induced collapse will be a mercy in the long term.
Yup, I’m not donating blood because the corps fuck over the folks with the high prices.
I donated blood once a couple of years ago. Afterwards, they called me several times a week for like a year. They still call me like once a month. I can’t get them to stop. They have called me hundreds of times. I’ll never donate again.
What I did was call back and get a real human.
I explained all the automated calls theyre doing was just making me not want to donate. And that since they come from different numbers I can’t just block them.
So I said the soonest I’ll ever donate to their company was a year after my last phone call.
It’s been like 6-9 months and I haven’t gotten a single phone call.
Because these companies are literal vampires and all they care about is blood.
Not sure if the calls are gonna start again or not.
Same experience here. It’s like 1/4 times they are going to fuck up with the needle. And then they call you, always from different numbers, to guilt you into donating. The last time I went they fucked up 3 times before asking if they could switch arms.
Yep. Red cross charges about $150 a pint for the blood you gave them for free. Pretty close to operating costs, probably.
Hospitals charge patients about $1,500 a pint, so they make over $1,200 a pint off what you gave away for free.