Blood Money

The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry

By: Kathleen McLaughlin

Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen, Kathleen McLaughlin

Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

A “haunting” (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even) and deeply personal investigation of an underground for-profit medical industry and the American underclass it drains for blood and profit.

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable.

So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing an industry that targets America’s most economically vulnerable for immense profit.

Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to utilize that country’s scandal-plagued plasma supply—outbreaks throughout the 1990s and early 2000s struck thousands with blood-borne diseases as impoverished areas of the country were milked for blood with reckless abandon. Instead, McLaughlin becomes her own runner, hiding American plasma in her luggage during trips from the United States to China. She finishes the job, but never could get the plasma story out of her head. Suspicions become certainties when a source from the past, a visiting Chinese researcher, warns McLaughlin of troubling echoes between America’s domestic plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China.

Blood Money shares McLaughlin’s decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. She travels the United States in search of the truth about human blood plasma and learns that twenty million Americans each year sell their plasma for profit—a human-derived commodity extracted inside our borders to be processed and packaged for retail across the globe. She investigates the thin evidence pharmaceutical companies have used to push plasma as a wonder drug for everything from COVID-19 to wrinkled skin. And she unearths an American economic crisis hidden in plain sight: single mothers, college students, laid-off Rust Belt auto workers, and a booming blood market at America’s southern border, where collection agencies target Mexican citizens willing to cross over and sell their plasma for substandard pay.

McLaughlin’s findings push her to ask difficult questions about her own complicity in this wheel of exploitation, as both a patient in need and a customer who stands to benefit from the suffering of others. Blood Money weaves together McLaughlin’s personal battle to overcome illness as a working American with an electrifying exposé of capitalism run amok in a searing portrait that shows what happens when big business is allowed to feed unchecked on those least empowered to fight back.

©2023 Kathleen McLaughlin. All rights reserved. (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

A great piece of journalism

This is a great work of journalism that highlights one of the many dark sides of the economic disparity in America. Once I started, I had a hard time hitting stop.

Oddly structured and repetitive

Wanted to like this way more, but it was very repetitive - from section to section, but also paragraph to paragraph sometimes. Didn’t always follow the tangents things went off on, and was put off by sweeping statements that didn’t acknowledge limitations (of 100 people interviewed, who had sold plasma, none had donated it, so no one does?).

Interesting dive into plasma donation

First, to the person who gave a 1 star, probably should have read the book description.
Second, the prose of writing and reading was smooth, and the story fluent. It was as good an op ed on the writers own experience, as it was a deep dive into the economy created from people selling their plasma.

Author inserts herself so much becomes unbearable

When I first started listening I was excited that a topic I was interested would be explored in some depth. As a person familiar with the US AIDS epidemic of the 80s/90s, a story with the Chinese perspective on this issue seemed interesting. I also have track marks on my arm still visible from giving plasma when I was younger.
But then you listen to the author talk about herself.
And talk about herself.
And talk about herself.
No joke in the first interview it takes 7 whole minutes of her describing lovely drives, landscapes & how beautiful the American West (her home) is before even getting the interview subject.
Most of the parts you'd expect examination of an issue or interesting person she glosses over and circles back to herself, where she lives (Montana) where she drove to once (Utah).
The author often just makes things up. From small things like Park City being the wealthiest small town in America (it's not) to using polls from her Twitter as proof of her "investigation" into people giving plasma horror stories (80% of her Twitter poll respondents never gave plasma), she can't help but drive the whole thing to her preconceived agenda. She also can't keep politics out and of course it's all Trump and Reagan's fault! I struggle to know why this is considered journalism when it's so one-sidedly political with her rants. The things you might want to know are only incidentally mentioned and never explored.
It appears the entire premise of this book is for her to feel good about helping the "poor" people who are "exploited" (her words) to sit in a chair for an hour for money. She extensively cites all her investigating but never gives you the results, preferring more hyperbole in her descriptions and large assumptions. She spends much more time referencing others' work for her book than doing leg work herself. It's also weird how she vacillates between praising the USA for its better health system than China, but then also often immediately compares the American system to China's to fit her political agenda of the plasma companies exploiting their customers. It's hard to reconcile her supposedly gratefulness with her acerbic commentary on American healthcare hurting people for profit.
The way this author can flip from being creeped out by her plasma transfusions to grateful to all the poors for keeping her alive in just a few sentences is a sight to behond! Skip it and find something less political and vanity driven. This book left me wanting details and facts instead of the stories, anecdotes & political rants from the author.

Good topic, too repetitive, not well written

Interesting topic and wanted to listen to it but had to stop by the third chapter due to how repetitive the writing was and the author’s obsession with centering herself in this story, as a user of plasma products. Also far too many tangents and personal stories that were not relevant.