Crowdfunding As Socialized Healthcare

Charity, ostensibly a central moral and social American institution, is alive and flourishing–online, on crowdfunding sites, as thousands and thousands of perfect strangers and sometimes acquaintances and friends and family, line up to donate to the latest plea for help. (Perhaps someone needs a vital organ transplant, extended chemotherapy and radiation, or a new, life-saving alternative therapy; or perhaps, like most Americans, they went into a hospital hoping to emerge healthier, and instead, found themselves facing a foreclosure-inducing medical bill.) As Bloomberg reports in an article unironically titled ‘America’s Healthcare Crisis Is a Gold Mine For Crowdfunding–later changed to ‘American Health Care Tragedies Are Taking Over Crowdfunding’:

Crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe and YouCaring have turned sympathy for Americans drowning in medical expenses into a cottage industry….Business is already booming, and its leaders expect the rapid growth to continue no matter what happens on the Hill. “Whether it’s Obamacare or Trumpcare, the weight of health-care costs on consumers will only increase,” said Dan Saper, chief executive officer of YouCaring. “It will drive more people to try and figure out how to pay health-care needs, and crowdfunding is in its early days as a way to help those people.”

Indeed:

Growth has been rapid….one million campaigns set up over the previous year had raised $1 billion from nearly 12 million donors. By February 2016, the total was $2 billion. In October 2016, it was $3 billion, from 25 million donors….GoFundMe had indicated that $930 million of the $2 billion raised in the period the study analyzed was from medical campaigns….medical fundraisers made up 70 percent of GiveForward’s campaigns. The combined companies have 8 million donors who have contributed $800 million to a wide range of campaigns. A big part…was donated to medical campaigns…It was approaching 50 percent of all fundraisers at YouCaring before the acquisition, and the growth rate is set to triple this year.

Indeed, no matter what the flavor of the current healthcare system, it will not take care of most Americans, and neither will it do anything to drive down the rising costs of healthcare. Short of progressive taxation, a national single-payer system, and extensive structural reform to bring the American healthcare system into line with the ‘best practices’–both financial and clinical–of the best national healthcare systems in the world, Americans look destined to continue pay the highest rates for healthcare in the world, while receiving outcomes that can be described, at best, as ‘mediocre.’ In these conditions, the success of crowdfunding campaigns is entirely unexpected and unsurprising; ‘look to private resources’ is the fairly explicit message of the current healthcare system, and it is there that Americans have turned. ‘Private resources’ are normally taken to mean financial support from family; Americans seem to have found a much larger family of sorts; a blessing of a kind, one supposes.

But mostly, reactions to this state of affairs can hardly afford to be sanguine. Such methods of paying for healthcare costs suffer from too much contingency; some campaigns succeed, yet others fail. Perhaps your pitch was not ‘moving’ enough; perhaps you did not include the right pictures of cute families; perhaps potential donors were financially exhausted. The health of the citizens of any country, let alone one with pretensions to greatness, should not be riven by so much uncertainty, so much dependence on the unpredictable largesse of others.