Living in the meantime, clicking through the stories, the mind strains to understand how we have failed so many people so badly. But in the meantime, we will continue to work hard to provide a place where Americans can help one another during times of need." 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. “A crowdfunding platform can not and should not be a solution to complex, systemic problems that must be solved with meaningful public policy. 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. GoFundMe itself acknowledges that its platform is no substitute for a sane society. Clicking through each is a public window into private pain.
Under a thin scrim of inspirational success is an ocean of pain, of loss, of fear and precarity. 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. There are hundreds, thousands more stories. “I have co-pays and prescription costs.” She has raised $25. “I’ve spent the last 2 years trying not to die,” she writes. “Im not that person that requires help or even asks for it, but i'm over $20,000 behind & just trying to see out.”Īmanda 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. “At diagnosis I first looked my own fate in the eye,” she writes, to a sea of strangers. She’s a new grandmother at 49, with stage 4 non-Hodgkins lymphoma. “God Bless your Heart.”Ī few clicks away, Sherry has raised $20 of $20,000. He doesn’t have health care at his job and he wants a healthy baby and a healthy wife. Robert, a young father, shows us the ultrasound, the swimmy picture of a forming life. 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.
Going viral online is a rare thing, but it’s a lottery that millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans cannot afford not to win. 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. Leukemia, lupus, hurricanes, diabetes, funerals: the site is an appealingly packaged catalog of human pain. 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. “Starting is easy,” the site says.Ĭrowdfunding 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. Round, unintimidating buttons invite you to initiate your own campaign. The homepage has an inviting, spare design, and offers fervent testimonials about the effectiveness of crowdfunding for expenses. The homepage promotes “top fundraisers,” which have accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars through the beneficence of strangers. When you go to, the crowdfunding site, naturally, touts its successes.
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