America's health care system is so broken that every year, hundreds of
thousands of people are literally asking for donations to afford medical treatment.
GoFundMe has helped Americans pay for billions of dollars in medical bills.
Leah Butler is one of them.
- If you see, I got the final notice. That mean, girl, pay up, but I'm not.
Leah has thousands in medical debt because her
3-year-old daughter, Alayah, requires 'round-the-clock care.
And the shocking thing is, Leah has medical insurance.
Ho, ho.
Private insurance has got to go.
So is GoFundMe actually helping Americans avoid medical debt?
Or is there a better way to do health care in this country?
If you visit GoFundMe.com's medical page, you'll see this quote:
"You can get immediate help with medical bills."
Scroll down farther and GoFundMe calls itself
"the leader in online medical fundraising."
The site hosts hundreds of thousands of medical campaigns each year.
You might even come across this one.
Last year, Alayah suffered a seizure and heart attack,
which left her brain damaged.
The way Alayah was before the incident? Alayah was,
Alayah was funny.
She would make you smile.
She was loving.
She was bossy. You gonna make me cry, girl.
She was just everything.
Like, that was my best friend.
After she used up all her savings, Leah started a GoFundMe
to help offset some of her daughter's recovery expenses.
But that's not why Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester started GoFundMe.
It was supposed to be for festive occasions, like vacations and weddings.
In the year GoFundMe launched, just 42 campaigns on the site were
health care-related.
By 2018, that number skyrocketed to over 100,000.
There needs to be a real look at why there is such
an expectation for patients to pay so much out of their own,
of their own means towards their medical care.
From 2016 to 2020, medical GoFundMe campaigns in the U.S.
raised more than $2 billion from donations.
According to one study, cancer was the medical condition
most fundraised for, while trauma and injury were second.
But Americans aren't going to GoFundMe just to raise money
for rare disease treatment, or even medical emergencies.
They're also starting campaigns to pay for routine care.
- Not only do we have the medical debt, it's the co-pays.
You know, like every other week, she's at a specialist. So I'm paying $30 here.
$30 there. $30 there. $40 here.
$30 there. $30 there. That adds up.
So that's where the GoFundMe come in at, to just help me
cover them rusty ends that I can't meet.
Following emergency room visits, research shows that co-pays
to see your doctor, childbirth, dental care
and lab tests are among the leading causes of medical debt.
If Alayah was born in any other industrialized country,
her mom probably wouldn't have to ask for donations to pay for her treatment.
So where did it all go wrong?
For starters, unlike many countries, the United States does not see
health care as a human right.
That's why it's the only upper-income country without universal health care,
a system designed to guarantee coverage for everyone while keeping costs down.
Health care in the U.S. is based on a mostly private insurance system.
Like any business, their main objective is to profit,
which has a domino effect on the price of health care,
driving costs up.
And although employers subsidize some insurance coverage,
that cost gets pushed increasingly down to the individual who's trying
to get the care.
In 2017, about 34% of health care costs, more than $800 billion,
didn't even go toward treatment.
They were actually covering the administrative costs of insurance companies.
Now, here's something you might not know.
In the U.S., patients are charged for each service they receive.
This is called fee-for-service health care.
Take a look at this medical bill.
If you stay overnight in the emergency room, you won't just be charged for the visit.
You'll also be charged a fee for every service provided.
This could be $90 for morphine.
$722 for IV pushes
And $6.50 for a pill.
Or, if you just gave birth, $40 to hold your newborn.
Yeah, that's a thing.
More than 80% of primary care doctors and more than 90%
of specialists in the U.S. are actually compensated based on the volume
of services they provide. This means they're incentivized to overprescribe,
and sometimes provide, unnecessary services to patients, rather than helping
them get healthier.
In short, the more procedures providers deliver, the more money
they make. But that equates to a larger bill for you.
That is an untenable situation that we have got to address.
And that to me is where we are always focused.
What is the impact on the patient?
And what changes can we make to ensure that the patient
isn't shelling out so much out of their own pocket
in order to get basic health care needs met?
And lastly, health care is so expensive because the
government doesn't regulate it.
The U.S. government has no control over what hospital systems and
pharmaceutical companies charge for their services, including
care, insurance or drugs.
There's another reason Alayah's mom was more likely to need
help on GoFundMe.
Twenty-eight percent of Black households and 22% of Latino households
have medical debt, in comparison to 17% of white households
and 10% of Asian ones.
This gap is even wider when you factor in location.
In places like St. Louis County, Missouri, that percentage quadrupled
for communities of color compared to white communities.
So it's a good thing that Americans have GoFundMe to help them
get out of this nightmare, right?
GoFundMe does not work to solve people's medical debt problems.
It helps some individuals, but it doesn't help the vast majority.
Take Mississippi, for example.
The state's population has the highest percentage of medical debt,
and it has one of the highest percentages of uninsured individuals.
And yet, GoFundMe health campaigns from Mississippi
have raised less money than campaigns from any other state.
That's a pattern repeated across the country.
People in states with higher medical debt, lower insurance and lower incomes
receive less money than those in states with lower debt, higher
insurance levels and higher incomes.
So while GoFundMe may help, it isn't leveling the playing field.
So when I first started the GoFundMe, I. My initial goal was $10,000
because I was thinking about the things we needed right then and there.
I initially made $3,000 and I took the $3,000 and got her
the van that she needed to take her to therapy and get her back and forth
to all her appointments.
Leah's campaign has raised close to $7,000.
But I thank God for just being able to have a little funds to where— the GoFundMe,
it helped me out a lot.
But not everyone is as fortunate with hitting their fundraiser goal.
When it comes to the overall success of medical campaigns on GoFundMe,
16% of them raised nothing, while 90%
failed to meet their goal, in 2020.
Many of the people behind these desperate campaigns end up bankrupt.
Unsurprisingly, medical debt is the No. 1 cause of
bankruptcy in the United States.
And once the medical debt goes into collection:
Collection agencies take a variety of actions,
as do hospitals, to collect their debt.
It could be anything from garnishing someone wages,
going after their home, going after their car.
It could just be harassing phone calls.
In April, the White House announced measures it would take to help ease
medical debt for Americans, like informing consumers of their rights
and making medical debt forgiveness for veterans more accessible.
And starting in July 2022, the three largest credit bureaus
will remove paid medical debts from credit reports.
So these are solid changes in the right direction,
but I also want to be clear that it is not enough in and of itself.
The small changes we see happening now are thanks to decades of grassroots
efforts to push politicians to address the root cause of medical debt: the U.S.
not having universal health care.
But will this become a reality anytime soon?
You know, there's a lot of calls, appropriately, for,
you know, should there be a single payer system?
Should there be universal health care?
I don't, frankly, see the politics lining up for that.
And so I want to see changes that are going to happen immediately.
Allison believes the first thing that needs to change is insurance.
People are feeling like they have an insurance plan
that they're paying a lot for a premium on.
And then what they're getting for it is something they can't actually afford,
and that should not be allowed.
I just really think that the government is really plucking us.
That's the word I'll use.
It's plucking us because I really think we deserve
more as citizens, and as taxpayers.
We deserve help.