Unemployment and dim economic prospects are pushing an increasing number of ingenious Taiwanese to make money in the corridors of Taiwan's medical institutions, the Chinese-language media reported yesterday.
More and more Taiwanese are selling their sperm and blood online, with most offers popping up on campus BBS sites and Internet chatrooms, the report said.
The sperm sale trend seems to have arisen in response to a persistent demand from infertile couples who wish to have children. Most major medical institutions in Taiwan have sperm banks to be used for artificial insemination.
But a lack of donors has left many sperm banks empty most of the time.
Semen is going for NT$5,000 to NT$6,000 per transaction, but the price could be higher if the "sperm bull" (
Selling semen is illegal in Taiwan, but physicians believe stopping the surreptitious transactions would be difficult as long as the market demand is there.
The bad times are also turning blood into a commodity, with a 500cc pouch fetching NT$4,000, the report said.
Tu Wen-ching (杜文靖), an employee from the Chinese Blood Services Foundation (中華血液基金會), said she had received several dozen phone calls offering blood sales over the past two weeks.
The so-called "registration scalpers" (
The "registration scalpers" either make reservations for outpatient visits on behalf of their clients or line up in front of outpatient centers and then sell their place to patients who arrive later.
The scalpers' services have risen from NT$500 to NT$700 per patient, according to the Chinese-language media.
The government's new "reasonable outpatient quota" policy provides incentives for major hospitals to curb the number of daily outpatient visits.
The policy is designed to cut the financial losses besetting the National Health Insurance program.
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