What the Medical GoFundMes That Don’t Get Funded Say About America
When you go to GoFundMe.com, the crowdfunding site, naturally, touts its successes. The homepage promotes “top fundraisers,” which have accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars through the beneficence of strangers. The homepage has an inviting, spare design, and offers fervent testimonials about the effectiveness of crowdfunding for expenses. Round, unintimidating buttons invite you to initiate your own campaign. “Starting is easy,” the site says.
Crowdfunding mostly swims across our timelines in the guise of inspirational news stories about mothers saved from cancer, or citizens of the entire country coming together to provide aid after natural disasters, or kids turning to virtual lemonade stands to aid family members with leukemia. But beyond these inspirational stories, crowdfunding is also necessary for millions of Americans: according to a 2016 study by the Pew Research Center, some 3 percent of Americans—nearly 10 million people—have created a crowdfunding project of their own. Leukemia, lupus, hurricanes, diabetes, funerals: the site is an appealingly packaged catalog of human pain. For ten million people, life-saving care is a function of being able to appeal to a crowd of strangers, to the blink-and-you’ll-miss it nature of the attention economy.
Going viral online is a rare thing, but it’s a lottery that millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans cannot afford not to win. In a system in which bankruptcy related to medical expenses makes up two-thirds of overall bankruptcies, charity—an appeal to the whims of the Internet —is often the only choice available to those who seek treatment for accidents or disease.
While the Internet is rife with crowdfunding sites, GoFundMe in particular is a juggernaut: according to statistics a company spokesperson provided to GQ via e-mail, it raised $5 billion through its campaigns between 2010 and 2017; the company has continued to grow ever since, acquiring other crowdfunding platforms, like YouCaring and Crowdrise, along the way. Although GoFundMe offers an abundance of categories to fundraise for—Faith, Newlywed, Competition, Wishes—one-third of the fundraising campaigns on the site are for medical expenses, according to the company. A search for “cancer” on the site turned up 3.1 million fundraising campaigns.
The site’s algorithm tends to surface successful fundraisers first, in part due to a recency bias—a company source told me that campaigns with recent donations are more likely to crop up while browsing the site. But as I scrolled down a little further, I saw the claw marks of austerity gouging deep into life after life. A telling sign is what happens when you search “health insurance.” The lack of health insurance is a uniquely American problem among industrialized countries, one borne of the sheer go-it-alone malice of our frayed social contract. A search for the term “health insurance” returns over one million campaigns. Scanning through them is a brief glimpse into a maelstrom of social collapse. As Medicare For All— in all the variations Democratic presidential candidates have come up with—is debated on brightly lit stages, and the Trump administration fights to whittle down the Affordable Care Act in court, GoFundMe offers a close-up view of the human cost of inadequate policy.
On GoFundMe, you can help buy health insurance for Gilda, a grandmother of six, her long white hair flowing down her back in one photo and buzzed in the next. “Last week I had my first session of chemo with my daughter by my side,” she writes. “I'm very fortunate my health insurance is excellent and my co-pays are low. I'm very grateful for that. But I find that I won't be able to work full time during this and I have no savings to fill in the gaps in income…. This is my last resort to be able to stay in my apartment.” She has raised less than half of what she needs.
Scroll down a page and find Sam. He is entering the priesthood. “I do not have enough in savings to pay my health insurance bills after I have left my job for a life of prayer and study,” he writes. “You have my gratitude and prayers for any amount, however small, you can provide for this purpose.” But prayers cannot make up for the missing $1,700.
Robert, a young father, shows us the ultrasound, the swimmy picture of a forming life. He doesn’t have health care at his job and he wants a healthy baby and a healthy wife. “We got denied on Medi-Cal,” he writes. “God Bless your Heart.”
A few clicks away, Sherry has raised $20 of $20,000. She’s a new grandmother at 49, with stage 4 non-Hodgkins lymphoma. “At diagnosis I first looked my own fate in the eye,” she writes, to a sea of strangers. “Im not that person that requires help or even asks for it, but i'm over $20,000 behind & just trying to see out.”
Amanda writes that she is starving to death, about to endure surgery to remove her stomach and surviving on V8 juice in the interim, which is not covered by her food stamps. “I’ve spent the last 2 years trying not to die,” she writes. “I have co-pays and prescription costs.” She has raised $25.
There are hundreds, thousands more stories. It’s the dark shadow of the viral success story, of the whole town coming together for a charity clambake, of the fully-funded child beaming from beneath a web of tubes. Under a thin scrim of inspirational success is an ocean of pain, of loss, of fear and precarity. Clicking through each is a public window into private pain. Cumulatively, it is a source of rage.
GoFundMe itself acknowledges that its platform is no substitute for a sane society. In a statement, the company told me as much: “While GoFundMe can provide timely, critical help to people facing health care crises, we do not aim to be a substitute social safety net,” a statement from a company representative read. “A crowdfunding platform can not and should not be a solution to complex, systemic problems that must be solved with meaningful public policy. We believe that affordable access to comprehensive health care is a right, and action must be taken at the local, state, and federal levels of government to make this a reality for all Americans. But in the meantime, we will continue to work hard to provide a place where Americans can help one another during times of need."
Living in the meantime, clicking through the stories, the mind strains to understand how we have failed so many people so badly. How can we have failed Alfreda, who is working three jobs to afford her daughter’s cerebral palsy treatment? The baclofen pump is failing sooner than expected and the bills are due. And she loves her daughter. And she’s raised $350 out of a $10,000 goal.
There are thousands of these stories; there are over a million, in fact. You should not have to be photogenic and spell well and have a lot of friends on social media not to die in debt. You should not have to ask for largesse from the Internet not to drown, but the waters are rising all around us, and from those dark waters, grasping hands rise like anemones, and clutch for a spar or at air.
Talia Lavin is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her first book, Culture Warlords, is forthcoming in 2020 from Hachette Books.
He went from the rumpled bit player of the progressive movement to a legit presidential candidate and liberal kingmaker. But now that Sanders wields such enormous power in Democratic politics, the question is, what’s he going to do with it? Jason Zengerle hit the road with Sanders as the senator grapples with what to do next.
Drew Magary on how debt is still a grift for the well-off ten years after the financial crash.
Originally Appeared on GQ
