Vampire Economics?

This story caught my eye. The New York Times outlines how each blood donation, paid out at $30 a pop, generates $300 in pharmaceutical products.

Blood donation centers concentrate in extremely poor areas, with high health issues including drug addiction.

So, get this, Mexicans are crossing the border twice a week to donate blood, to earn $60 a week. It's more money than what they can make on wages in Mexico!

Twice a week, Ms. Delgado, the mother of three young girls, walks across the bridge from Piedras Negras, Mexico, where she lives, to Eagle Pass and enters a building just two blocks from the border.

Inside, for about an hour, Ms. Delgado lies hooked to a machine that extracts plasma, the liquid part of the blood, from a vein in her arm. The $60 a week she is paid almost equals her husband’s earnings.

“This is like another income,” she says.

Hundreds, probably thousands, of Mexicans like Ms. Delgado come to the United States to trade their plasma for dollars. Eagle Pass, a town of 27,000 that bills itself as the place “where yee-hah meets olé,” has two such plasma collection centers. There are about 15 others in border cities from Brownsville, Tex., to Yuma, Ariz.

My immediate thought was vampire economics? Shall we soon be keeping people in poverty stricken areas where they can "grow some kidneys" for the U.S. market at a reduced cost?

Even more insightful is how the U.S. cannot import blood, hence they are importing the donors who have the blood....instead.

What's wrong with this picture?

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