I’m guessing it boils down to capitalism like most modern problems.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Good guess
This reads like a puff piece somehow. At any rate fuck the health insurance industry, and if the product really is as good as presented here then it should be more broadly available.
Also, we'd be able to mix this stuff with drinking water and it would be fine to inject into someone's bloodstream? I could be very wrong but I don't think most drinking water is treated+packaged to that high of a standard. I suppose the hypothetical mentioned in the article also in case of severe blood loss, where getting literally anything into your veins that won't outright kill you is preferable to the alternative.
Yes, more of us should give blood. But also, we know that even a five-minute delay in giving someone blood reduces their chances of survival. It’s like CPR. You wouldn’t wait to start CPR until you get to the hospital. We all know that you have to start it right away. Same with blood: You should give blood as soon as you can. Right now, in most of the U.S., blood is not given before the hospital because it can’t be reimbursed under our current system.
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Because it will just go bad at a certain point?
No, no, it’s the billing system. It’s the insurance companies. No one will reimburse for blood that is given before you get to the hospital.
In your piece, you tell the story of a clinical trial in which they put blood on ambulances and got it to people before the hospital, and it showed a huge improvement in survival. Then, as soon as the clinical trial was over, they had to take it out because there was no way to get it paid for.
The surgeons who spoke to me about this called it criminal. And I think they’re right. It’s really wrong that we know how to save lives already and we aren’t doing it because it’s not reimbursable.
It strikes me as deeply ironic that we already have these solutions that could save lots and lots of lives if we simply gave more blood and figured out a way to make insurance companies pay for it on ambulances. We could be saving tens of thousands of lives already before we ever get a synthetic replacement.