The great blood-sucking contest: eurocrats vs. vampires
(A vampire’s angry surprise)

I must confess, as a vampire it happened to me a few times to become too greedy and drain the blood out of a meal completely. You don’t do that usually, and in time you learn to control yourself. But to drain the blood out completely from an entire national healthcare system… well, you have to do that by legislation. This is what I’m talking about:

Charter of the fundamental rights of the European Union
Chapter I: Dignity
Article 3: Right to the integrity of the person
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity
2. In the fields of medicine and biology the following must be respected in particular:
– the prohibition on making the human body and its parts as such a source of financial gain

A few days ago a newspaper article caught my eye. It seems that here in Romania the hospitals are going out of blood nationwide. The number of people volunteering to donate blood has declined steadily in recent years, and now the healthcare personnel fears that the coming joining of the European Union by this country will bring an outright crisis of blood because the European regulations forbid any kind of remuneration for this service. Till now, everyone who went to give blood received a food ticket of approximately 11 dollars and two days off from the job. But giving your blood, according to European decision makers, should be a completely idealistic affair, untainted by lowly material considerations. So, there will be now more legal basis for any kind of payment, and we may be heading toward a very serious blood shortage.
Let’s get real now, people! By forbidding any kind of payment for blood, the government does nothing more then to push down the price of blood to zero. As a consequence, all those who desire to provide it, unless they are driven by idealistic motives, will stay away from the collection centers. It is as simple as that. You really don’t need a PhD in economics to figure out that much. Unless your job is to legislate. In that case even a PhD in economics doesn’t help.
Letting this issue to the free market is out of question, of course. Imagine the horror: private enterprises that purchase blood from you if you want, and are ready to pay you the market price for that. Private enterprises do not have the power to stop idealistic organizations and persons to collect blood from voluntary donors without payment – unlike political figures, that have the power to decide for you what you can and what you cannot do with what nature has given to you. In the free market you are fee either to sell your blood or to donate it freely. It’s your call. In the E. U. you can only donate it. A free market could provide for both patients and donors what they need: the patient gets the blood, while the donor may get money, or just good points for the time due in purgatory, according to his/her expectation. For many poor people, who don’t really have much to live on this source of occasional income could only be a blessing. But you cannot have that, because it is against their dignity, and the state has the obligation to oversee that everyone’s dignity, as defined by the state itself, remains intact.
I must say that I am outraged that people go along with this and accept it like sheep. As far as I am concerned people should be sheep only when we vampires want to feed. And since when does the E. U., or any other state, feel free to dispose of the bodies of it’s subjects? I thought that was in medieval times when your body belonged to your feudal lord and you were supposed to give your blood for him. No, people, your blood does not belong to your lords. It belongs to my fellow vampires and me. And I think it is time that we vampires wake up and reclaim our rights over the blood of the people, and do something about this growing competition from the E. U.