Paid plasma donations are becoming more middle-class

 The NYT has the story:

The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By.  Across the United States, plasma centers are opening in wealthier areas as more people struggle with the high cost of housing, groceries and health care.   By Kurtis Lee and Robert Gebeloff   March 20, 2026

"Every day, an estimated 215,000 people donate plasma, the yellowish liquid component of blood. Mr. Briseño is among them. He is not jobless or facing eviction, but, like many in the American middle class, he is caught in the vise of rising expenses and wages that aren’t growing fast enough to cover them. So he is turning to a method more commonly associated with the lowest-income Americans. For people like him, an extra $600 or so a month can mean making a mortgage payment or covering increased health-insurance costs.

"A recent study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Colorado, Boulder, observed that while older plasma centers are clustered in low-income areas, newer centers were increasingly likely to open in middle-class neighborhoods. A New York Times analysis shows the trend has continued: Centers have sprung up in more than 100 such neighborhoods, in suburbs and wealthier sections of cities, since researchers finished collecting their data in 2021."

 

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Here's an earlier post on the study that sparked the NYT report:

Wednesday, November 16, 2022  Blood Money, by John Dooley and Emily Gallagher