A Comparison of Online Medical Crowdfunding in Canada, the UK, and the US

Abstract

Key Points Question Why do individuals from Canada, the UK, and the US turn to medical crowdfunding and what factors are associated with funding success? Findings In this cross-sectional study of 3396 crowdfunding campaigns designed to raise monetary donations for medical expenses, female gender, Black race, and routine care were associated with a strong fundraising disadvantage. For campaigns primarily funding treatment, routine care was overwhelmingly represented in the US (77.9%), in contrast to Canada (21.9%) and the UK (26.6%), and crowdfunding primarily funding alternative therapies (16.0%) was more common for cancer (23.5%) vs noncancer (6.5%) diagnoses. Meaning These findings suggest that there are important differences in the reasons for medical crowdfunding across the 3 countries included in this analysis and that there are racial and gender disparities in crowdfunding success.

Early Crowdfunding Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Cross-sectional Study

“…As the issue became widespread and the ability to set a campaign apart as a worthy cause became more difficult, the effort (cost) of creating a campaign may have been outweighed by the perceived likelihood of funding. As others have found, the concept of worthiness and augmenting one’s “illness narrative” become important factors in generating campaign appeal, influence, and ultimately fundraising success [ 6 , 20 - 22 ]. The states with the earliest disease burden had the fewest campaigns per case, indicating a lack of case-dependent response; this supports the premise that potential campaign designers perceive common illnesses as less likely to receive the attention of donors over time.…”

“…Although web-based crowdfunding raises millions of dollars, our study suggests that it may function as a financial safety net for a limited subset of beneficiaries. First, there is ample evidence that crowdfunding success disproportionately benefits those in areas with high socioeconomic status and those with the internet and media literacy necessary to portray beneficiaries as worthy [ 6 , 21 - 23 ]. Second, medical expenses alone due to COVID-19 in the United States are estimated to be in excess of $163 billion if 20% of the population is infected (on August 26, 2020, approximately 1.8% of the population had a confirmed infection) [ 24 ].…”

“…Donation-based web-based crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular tool to finance medical treatment, respond to financial hardships and natural disasters, and defray the downstream economic impacts of personal health care costs [ 6 , 7 ]. Previous research has shown that crowdfunding has been used to address the needs of individuals and communities after natural disasters [ 8 ].…”

A Cross-sectional Comparison of Utilization of Medical Crowdfunding for Global Health

“…Limitations of this study include the relatively small sampling of GoFundMe initiatives in each cohort although an iterative process of review by separate study personnel to ensure saturation of some of the qualitative themes facilitated a good reflection of the separate campaigns. However, our data with respect to fundraising goals, raised amount, number of donors, and shares of personal health campaigns were on par to another recent study regarding medical crowdfunding on GoFundMe (4). GoFundMe provides no explicit global health category in their search function so campaigns were identified from general search terms which might have led to some sampling bias.…”

“…Online solicitation of public donations has become an important financing option for health care expenses, intensified by increasing costs in jurisdictions without universal public systems including the United States (US) (3). These online appeals for personal medical causes have grown significantly over the last decade in developed countries although the utility of medical crowdfunding in different countries vary (4). In high-income countries (HICs) with universal healthcare such as Canada, there is less concern about personal expenses to cover costs of medical treatments opening up an opportunity for global altruism and resource sharing.…”