GoFundMe is an increasingly popular way to raise money to cover medical expenses, where storytelling and personal connections often play a crucial role
When patients turn to crowdfunding for medical costs, whoever has the most heartrending story wins. — For those who want their hearts broken … Tweets: @nathanheller , @newyorker , @newyorker , @jessicagolds , @lizszabo , @devonrgoss , @newyorker , @jeremycsnyder , @repdebdingell , and @silviakillings Tweets: Nathan Heller / @nathanheller : In this week's @NewYorker, I look at crowdfunding as an increasingly popular solution to the rising costs of medical care. Who really wins and loses? https://www.newyorker.com/... pic.twitter.com/O2vrPlKZZc @newyorker : When their infant twins were diagnosed with Canavan disease, the Ilinetskys turned to crowdsourcing for help with medical expenses. But without systemic health-care reform, how much can crowdsourcing help? http://nyer.cm/i4wzvgv @newyorker : Rob Solomon, the C.E.O. of GoFundMe, blames the rising trend of medical crowdfunding on income inequality. He believes that GoFundMe itself is only a stopgap measure for a systemic health-care problem in the U.S. http://nyer.cm/Q69PBci Jessica Goldstein / @jessicagolds : “The true mark of class vulnerability today isn't the capacity to run out of money but the capacity to run out of options. In the blind alleys of public health, GoFundMe has become both a first stop and a last resort.” https://www.newyorker.com/... Liz Szabo / @lizszabo : The Perverse Logic of GoFundMe Health Care: Patients with the saddest stories win. https://www.newyorker.com/... Devon R. Goss / @devonrgoss : This is another way of saying that advantages in crowdfunding still go to the people who arrive with the most powerful connections and the best networks. https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : As medical costs rise and health-insurance deductibles increase, crowdfunding has become both a first stop and a last resort for people desperate to pay their bills. In 2017, a third of all money raised on GoFundMe was for medical expenses. http://nyer.cm/mhtjz1q Jeremy Snyder / @jeremycsnyder : Fascinating discussion of @gofundme for healthcare from @nathanheller, including funding for clinical trial participation. https://www.newyorker.com/... pic.twitter.com/UmYBWTRDox Rep. Debbie Dingell / @repdebdingell : Fundraising is not healthcare. No one should be forced to start a crowdfunding website because of medical bills. https://www.newyorker.com/... Silvia Killingsworth / @silviakillings : “A third of the money raised on GoFundMe in 2017 was for medical expenses.” https://www.newyorker.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Medical crowdfunding has been building toward this moment for years: Bloomberg flagged in 2017 that fundraising on GoFundMe and YouCaring rises as more Americans lose coverage, and by 2017 a third of all money raised on the platform was for medical bills. GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon had already conceded the dynamic in his BBC interview, calling the platform a stopgap for systemic healthcare problems while acknowledging campaigns that turn politicized and scam-prone.
The New Yorker's investigation sharpens that framing: crowdfunding doesn't distribute money by need but by narrative — the most heartrending story and the widest personal network win. Rep. Debbie Dingell's objection that 'fundraising is not healthcare' gives the piece its policy edge, and the Atlantic's follow-up on three campaigns and the complexities of the GoFundMe ecosystem shows the pattern holding at scale, with 50M people donating $5B+ through 2017.
First-order effects
- Patients become fundraisers: access to care now depends partly on storytelling skill and social-network reach, systematically advantaging those with photogenic, emotionally legible cases over equally sick people who can't package their need.
- GoFundMe's medical category — a third of its 2017 volume — becomes the platform's de facto core business, pulling it deeper into healthcare's cost failures than a donations site ever planned to be.
Second-order effects
- Political scrutiny intensifies: Dingell's 'fundraising is not healthcare' critique gives legislators a concrete symbol of cost-shifting, and Solomon's own stopgap framing hands critics the admission that the platform is plugging a policy hole.
- Platform governance costs rise — the scam and politicization problems Solomon described force GoFundMe to police medical campaigns it profits from, while hospitals and providers face patients arriving with crowdfunded, earmarked cash.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, medical crowdfunding hardens into a shadow safety net whose allocation is set by narrative appeal and network size rather than clinical need — a distribution mechanism no insurer or legislature would ever design, which is precisely the argument for policy action.
- The longer arc runs from Bloomberg's 2017 coverage-uninsured correlation through the Atlantic's ecosystem portrait: charity platforms absorbing risk that healthcare financing was supposed to cover, normalizing privatized medical need one campaign at a time.
The trend: Rising medical costs are pushing patients onto donation platforms, turning medical crowdfunding into a parallel, unequal safety net whose growth tracks the gaps in American health coverage.