This is it. People have to stop believing that paying staff is apparently a "waste of funds".

As a specialist in my industry, I don't work at schools and nonprofits, not because I don't want to, but because their pay is usually half of the industry average. It's sad. And you can't "donate your speciality" to these places either. Nobody wants a volunteer specialist.

I’ve looked into plasma, apparently a lot of the world won’t use US plasma because we pay donors for it, it does incentivize bad behavior, and most countries won’t allow plasma donation any more frequently than blood donation. Which is every 8-ish weeks. We can do two donations a week (and it’s incentivized to encourage just that). Some desperate people game the system to do it at multiple places, even resorting to eating various things (like ketchup packets) to trick the blood tests.

But even then these companies sell it for enough (I think it’s used for cancer treatments?) to make enough on the domestic market that even paying for it is highly profitable.

Well said. It’s a big problem we have nowadays where people don’t want to accept that most if not all things in life are nuanced. It’s not all black and white.

And it’s sad that this lack of critical thinking is costing blood donations centers their ability to function adequately.