The Rise of Crowdfunding for Medical Care: Promises and Perils

Crowdfunding is a financing method characterized by pooling together a large number of smaller contributions to support a specific initiative. The emergence of social media and numerous online platforms has allowed crowdfunding to flourish in popularity. Crowdfunding is an especially effective and popular tool in the realm of supporting charitable or ideological causes. Increasingly prevalent in this realm is crowdfunding for health care costs. Many top-earning campaigns on crowdfunding sites are medical in nature. These include campaigns to directly pay for an individual’s medical care as well as those intending to accelerate research on and access to experimental interventions. Sophisticated search tools allow potential donors to sort through campaigns based on specific diseases, age, location, or background of patients.