Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

It's estimated that 20 million Americans sell their own blood plasma for cash every year

in a market that is barely regulated. On this episode, we'll get an inside look at the blood plasma for cash every year in a market that is barely regulated. On this episode, we'll get an

inside look at the blood plasma industry and how it preys on some of the country's most

marginalized communities. Joining us is award-winning journalist Kathleen McLaughlin, whose new book is

called Blood Money, the story of life, death, and profit inside America's blood industry.

Kathleen, we thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

You write, we've built an entire segment of global medicine upon the certainty that some

number of Americans simply can't live on a regular income alone.

That is a really sobering statement. You're saying they need blood money to supplement their

wages and make their lives easier. Tell us more about this. Yeah. So when I first got into this

reporting, I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to find. I think like a lot of

people, I had the idea that people who sell their plasma for money in the U.S. are the poorest

of the poor and that it doesn't affect anyone beyond the very poorest. What I found was quite

surprising, which is that a lot of the poorest of

the poor, unhoused people, for example, are screened out of the system. And in recent years,

it's become much more common for middle class people or people kind of on the fringes of middle

class to engage in this. As things have gotten expensive,

we have higher housing prices, higher inflation, higher cost of education. You can now find, you know,

...