My esteemed colleague Adriene Hill tells me that a pint of blood in the US is worth around $150. That’s what the Red Cross gets for it when it sells to hospitals. Now the IRS won’t let you deduct for the time you spend donating blood, but what about for donating something that has a specific market value?
Turns out, you can deduct the cost of a kidney, but you can’t deduct for blood. Which seems a little unfair.
Not that it matters to me: being from the UK, and therefore probably infected with mad cow disease, they won’t take my blood anyway.
