That we should pay people to donate blood

I'm going to assume my opponent doesn't actually mean 100% donation rates because drawing blood from those with AIDs or those with low blood pressure is probably just going to kill lots of people. Only around 30% of the population in first-world countries are actually eligable to give blood, and for good reason [1]. I'll continue on this basis.Protecting autonomyWe've learned from history not to take away autonomy for medical treatments [2]. Patient autonomy is today recognised as the first of the four principles of medical ethics [3] and legally enshrined in many bills of rights around the world, including that of my own country [4]. That's why we don't force vaccinations, for example. And in countries where things like vaccinations have been forced, like India or much of Africa - sometimes at gunpoint - more people have died fighting over whether the vaccines are dangerous or not than have actually been killed by the vaccines in those countries [5][6].On a rights level, the question is one of ownership. Does the government own your body, or do you individually? Who decides? We're all people with different worldviews, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's why personal rights - those relating to your person - are subjective. For the government, representative of the majority, to determine what treatments your body should receive. As the preamble to the UN Declaration of Human Rights notes "Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world" - human rights are inherent to individuals, not states. The reason we have human rights and the UN itself was out of reaction to NAZI war crimes, including their forced "medical" treatments on Jewish groups and others. And it should be noted that among the horrible things the NAZIs were accused of doing in the so-called "doctor's trial" - alongside involuntary euthenasia and medical testing - was involuntary blood donation (from Russian prisoners to cure German soldiers).Morally and philosophically, autonomy is important to protect because it puts the responsibility for the action on the patient. Taking control away from the patient - in this case, away from their blood - is a simple insult to their personhood. After all, if something goes wrong, they're the ones who have to live with the consequences, so to have to live at the mercy of another's choices - even if they agree with those choices - only serves to take away their agency, self-determination, inalienable rights to the most basic of their property (their body), and ultimately self-esteem. Human bodies are not blood harvesting tools. They are human bodies.This is an ideal that people believe in. Even supporters of the treatment will often prefer to support autonomy. In principle, the idea of giving blood at gunpoint sounds absurd because killing you is not going to help your refusal to give blood, just like killing unvaccinated children actually makes communities less safe, not more (guns being far more deadly than disease). Yet this is exactly what compulsory blood donation is. The absurdity of this is still greater when you consider that there are legitimate reasons not to give blood. Many people contracted AIDs during blood donation drives before medical practices changed, after all. Not to mention the absurdity of forcing people at gunpoint to accurately fill in medical history forms that they usually can't verify.Compulsory donation schemes are not new - they have a long history of populations fleeing to escape involuntary donations, like in Uganda's police [7] or China's city of Shanghai [8] - even if those same populations actually agree that giving blood is a bloody good idea [9]. Even the sense of reduced autonomy can dissuade people from giving blood [10]. Removing forced donation consistently increases the amount donated [11]. It's crowding-out - the effect that I proved last round does not happen significantly under my model gets blown way out of proportion with my opponent's.You simply can't improve the health of communities by ignoring individuals. This is well recognised in public health research [12], in empirical data, in international law and rights analysis, and morality. Ironically, involuntary blood donation usually ends more lives than it saves. That's no good for either the donors or benefactors.A good doctor-patient relationship is important for any well-functioning healthcare system. Would you trust a doctor to give you blood if that same doctor had previously forced you into taking your blood away? Would you trust them with other injections? For some people, they'd be OK with that. Usually those are the same people who think blood donation is alright as well. But if you are afraid of your doctor, that means diseases can go undiagnosed, health quality in populations declines, more blood is needed by hospitals to deal with illnesses, less people are healthy enough to give blood. Go figure.SecurityIt's not quite true that my opponent's system is a guarentee. That is only the case if everybody complies. The more strongly or frequently his ordinance is enforced, the less the autonomy, so the less the compliance and the bigger the problem. My system doesn't have any problems with this, since higher financial rewards do not limit rights. If more blood is needed, more can simply be paid. I'd trust in compliance from willing over unwilling people any day.The idea that markets are unpredictable both destroys my opponent's demand-and-supply pricing model and ignores many years worth of empirical evidence that this is not the case in this market. People are reliably and predictably motivated by gaining money and autonomy.Too expensiveLet's say 10% donated once a year and they all got paid $100. In the USA, that's a cost of about 3 billion dollars, or about $9 per person per year, which is about 0.08% of the amount of tax the federal government earns from the median person. Empirical evidence provides that people usually need much less of an incentive and that it's doubtful whether so much blood could even be handled with the current infrastructure, being around 3 times what the USA needs right now. The cost is in any event tiny. Especially when compared with the benefit. And this is all assuming a 100% subsidy so there's no loss of care quality by hospitals. Even if hospitals passed it all on to patients, as my opponent rightly points out, that cost will be the least of the patient's worries, both with and without my model.What my opponent says about supply & demand economics is laughably false but it helps my case, since it posits that ANY increase in supply reduces price, so my model must be driving costs down as well, increasing quality of care. What he says about overheads is tragic. Testing the blood creates much more overheads than reimbursements for donation ever will. Medicine is not a question of cutting marginal costs, it's a question of improving care. If society needs to take on an extra $9 or so per person to ensure it has the healthcare it needs, I say that's better than forcing them into strange medical clinics to steal their blood. In fact, losing those $9 is a great incentive to donate blood an recoup $100, a $91 profit.Black MarketsBlack markets do not arise exclusively for economic reasons (see also my rebuttals on my opponent's odd strain of economics). They also come about for social reasons - for example, because patients are unwilling to use blood taken forcibly, and because donors are unwilling to give it forcibly. That's a problem for all the same reasons I gave you last round.Sources1 - http://bit.ly...2 - http://bit.ly...3 - http://1.usa.gov...4 - http://bit.ly...5 - http://bit.ly...6 - http://bit.ly...7 - http://bit.ly...8 - http://bit.ly...9 - http://bit.ly...10- http://bit.ly...11- http://bit.ly...12- http://1.usa.gov...