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A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Nora Kenworthy about her book titled Crowded the True Costs of Crowdfunding healthcare, published by MIT Press in 2024. Now, the book does pretty much exactly what it says it's going to do, which is always nice when those things line up, helping us understand what is actually happening when people use crowdfunding like GoFundMe to pay for healthcare in the United States. Obviously, the US Healthcare system is incredibly complex, and this is one way some people choose to try and navigate it. And often a way that gets a lot of kind of media headlines about maybe this particular child or this particular person, but that doesn't really tell us very much of sort of what's going on in a bigger picture sense. What this means longer term, what this means for how people interact digitally, what this means for medical care. It turns out through investigations like this, we can actually find out a whole lot. So, Nora, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your work.
C
Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
B
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to Write this book.
C
Sure. I'm a professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, and I'm trained in both public health and medical anthropology. So my work for a long time has thought about how people come into systems of healthcare, what they find there, and some of the unfairnesses that people experience there. I started working on this project after stumbling across a couple of GoFundMe campaigns very early on, after the company had been started. This was a time when people still printed off flyers of their campaign pages with like a little tear off tabs at the bottom and would post them around neighborhood. And I sort of felt like I had fallen down a rabbit hole of these incredibly personal stories of people's medical and health needs. And I just kind of didn't know what I was looking at. And I also couldn't look away. And as I dug deeper, you know, I realized what many people have realized since, which is what looks on the surface like a really interesting system for connecting people with help is instead a system that amplifies and exacerbates inequities, both social and health inequities. And the reason I wanted to put this into book form, I'd done a lot of research projects on GoFundMe. I'd done a lot of number crunching, a lot of quantitative articles. But the reason that I felt this really needed a book form was that I wanted a space in which to tell the actual human stories of what crowdfunding is like, separate from the kinds of stories that kind of get projected onto websites like GoFundMe, which are often adhering to a very specific type of narrative form, one which celebrates individual success and resilience. But the stories I was hearing from people about their actual campaign experiences were quite different. And I really wanted to be able to those into conversation together.
B
That is a very helpful introduction. And just from that, we're already getting a sense of how much information is out there to make sense of and how many different kinds of information there are as well when you start sort of pulling this thread. So can you give us more detail about sort of the sub questions you're asking in the project and the sorts of methods you're using to try and put all this together.
C
I guess it's important to say that when I started doing this work, there were very few people looking at this. And so, you know, the early sets of questions that I and a few other people were asking were really like, what's going on here? Who's using this? What happens to people when they crowdfund, are they successful? And as the project went along, we started to refine those questions to really, I think, really in response to a lot of public questions that we were getting from the press, from the public, from sometimes policymakers saying, okay, we need to know more about what's happening here than what companies like GoFundMe are telling us. We really need to know. For example, are people having very profoundly different experiences here and what explains those differences? And as we went along, we were also just uncovering really troubling data about just how unsuccessful a lot of crowdfunding campaigns were. And so that was really prompting me to want to dive deeper, particularly with the qualitative side of things, to speak to people about what's it really like when you have a campaign that raises $0, which in some of our research has shown that up to 30 or 40% of campaigns might be raising no money whatsoever, or what's it like to go viral when you don't want to because of a medical need? So I was really guided by the human experiences and also these kind of fundamental questions of unfairness that seem to keep popping up around this new form of social media technology and sort of this new marketplace of need.
B
Yeah, those are lots of questions. And as you've described, so many research projects start with one, and then it goes well and this and this. Right, so it's a continual exploration. Yeah, exactly. But that's helpful to have a sense of kind of how that evolved. And in fact, speaking of evolution, I want to make sure we cover that not just in terms of your project, but also in terms of crowdfunding itself. As you said, you started this when it was a pretty new. GoFundMe was a pretty new thing. So I think we want to understand the context in which it appears, as well, you talk about this in the book as being related to existing conditions and intertwinings of neoliberalism and racism. So can you help us make sense of kind of the environment in which crowdfunding for medical purposes becomes a thing that people attempt?
C
Yes, this is such a good question. So I think crowdfunding is rooted in a couple of really sort of, well, a lot of sticky social and cultural norms, as well as some really prevalent conditions in which people are often trying to get health care. So GoFundMe and other platforms like it were founded around 2010. So really right in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, this is a time when we're seeing lots of people struggling to get by acquiring new forms of debt. And in particular, we're beginning to see several new kinds of economic realities come to the fore. The first being sort of this gig economy or hustle economy, right? Founded on this idea that each person is an individual agent who can kind of work for themselves. But really your ability to economically survive is based on your ability to sort of hustle for these new types of platforms and digital economies. At the same time, we're really seeing the rise of late liberalism and especially predatory capital. And at least in places like the United States, where we have these really market driven health care systems, we're seeing that come into the health care system even, yes, in the United States, as the Affordable Care act was being kind of put into place, we were also seeing the impacts of this really predatory capital throughout the healthcare system. As I explained in the book, US Social programs, and in particular the US Healthcare system are really organized around these dual pillars of neoliberalism and racism. Much of the opposition that we see to expanded notions of a more universal healthcare system in the United States, much of the opposition to that is really rooted in people's belief in a free market and in the free choices that they think that market will provide to them, but also in long standing racist notions of people not wanting to share either fate or resources across racial lines. And so, generation after generation, you can see opposition to health care reform really emerging along these two lines. And what I'm trying to kind of point out in the book is that this is the legacy. This is the legacy in which all of us try and get health care and survive in the United States also. These are the conditions under which crowdfunding emerges and part of what fuels its success. Because if you look at the kind of underlying logics of crowdfunding, what is it asking people to do? It's asking people to distill what are essentially social program problems of not having enough healthcare, not having the right access to healthcare, but to distill those down into individual narratives of need, of charity, of success, to put that out in a very marketable way to a social network, to figure out ways to get that to spread through social networks and then on the donor side to be able to, essentially, some would put it as a freedom to have the choice to choose between different people that you may or may not find more or less deserving. And so a lot of the logics that have been foundational to our healthcare system are also logics that are very much being sort of amplified and reinforced and deepened through the crowdfunding economy.
B
Okay. That's very helpful to understand that crowdfunding to some extent, the particular platforms might come out of sort of nowhere, but they're building on, as you said, these legacies and the context in which kind of medical decisions are being made more broadly and ways that people are meant to engage with each other is also being shaped. So that's really helpful to understand.
C
And I should be clear, like, I don't think GoFundMe, like, you know, the founders of GoFundMe were like, you know, what we should do is make a platform that amplifies racism. You know, but I think, you know, if you look at the, like, remarkable rise of platforms like GoFundMe and, and of crowdfunding as a practice across societies, it's been this just astronomical growth year over year. And I think we should be able to point to some of the cultural scripts that fuel that growth and that make it very, give it a lot of traction socially and culturally.
B
Yeah. So one of the scripts I think we want to talk about more is this idea of kind of deservingness and meritocracy that's come up a sort of a few times already. What does that actually mean in terms of how campaigns are enacted on something like GoFundMe?
C
Sure. So it might be easiest for me to kind of illustrate this with a story. So in the book, I tell the story of Trevor, who's a single dad in Arkansas. He has diabetes, he's trying to recover from an accident, he's out of work. He used to be a part time web developer. So he's technologically savvy. Right. But he's in a really, really tight economic spot. He talks about not knowing whether he can provide Christmas for his son or having to put their house in foreclosure in order to pay for his diabetes treatment. And so, you know, Trevor, being a fairly technologically savvy guy, decides to see what he can do with crowdfunding. And so what he does is, you know, he told me he, he went to GoFundMe and he looked at all these different campaigns to try and figure out, like, what does well and, and how this system works. And while I think by any measure most people would say that Trevor's struggles are not his fault and that he deserves to have some help, what Trevor concluded when he kind of looked at this world of GoFundMe campaigns online was that he wasn't deserving enough. He said everything else was so much more tragic, it was so much more acute. And he said, I can't just, like, go to my Facebook friends and beg for money because I can't pay for my insulin. And Trevor also was, I think, someone who reflected a lot of American ideas about individualism, about sort of self survival and self reliance. He talked in our interview about not wanting to use his Medicaid benefits even when he qualified for them, and feeling a lot of shame about taking handouts either from the government or from his neighbors. But I think what he experienced when he went to crowdfunding was a really interesting sort of reflection of some of the values of deservingness and meritocracy that gets amplified and reinforced in that environment where someone like Trevor, who is really just having a string of bad luck, right. Can go to that site. And instead of concluding, oh, this is a place where I could get help, he instead concludes, this is not a place for me. This is not something that I deserve. And so, ultimately, Trevor decided to create a campaign because he was desperate, but he didn't actually share it with anyone that he knew or anyone in his social network. He just kind of, like, put it out there into the Internet and was sort of hoping that someone would come along and find him deserving. So it wasn't very surprising when he ultimately did not get any donations to his campaign. But I think stories like his help reinforce some of the very kind of, like, what I call morally toxic ideas about deservingness and selective deservingness that can get really reinforced through crowdfunding environments.
B
Yeah, that's definitely a very illustrative example. Does it also mean that people, like, what happens if it's the other way someone goes, oh, I don't seem as deserving, but here's how I can make myself seem more deserving if that makes sense. Like, in his case, the answer was, I won't tell anyone I know socially, I assume there's other possible reactions to that sort of thing.
C
Yes. And I think a lot of people are creating narratives and stories for crowdfunding campaigns that speak to their understanding of this kind of selective deservingness environment. And I'm not saying that people are. Most people are not lying in their campaigns. Right. I don't think it's like, intentional deceit, but I think a lot of people are playing into common ways, common frames through which we think about people's deservingness. You know, like, so common to see, you know, narratives about, you know, the sole breadwinner of a family or, you know, someone being a really good person. Right. There's a lot of appeals to goodness. And while it May not surprise us that those exist in this space. I want to sort of invite us to look at them anew and ask, what does it do? Like, what does it do when we decide that people only deserve charity for their medical care access if they're perceived as good or not by the Internet? And some people that I spoke to were much more explicit in cultivating their perceptions of goodness. So I interviewed a woman named Hannah who was crowdfunding for her friend Allison. Allison's son, her young, young son Beckett, was hit by a car in a parking lot near a playground. And Hannah started the campaign because she just, she didn't know what else to do. She felt for Alison. She was like, I want to be able to help them. The campaign was sort of full of these pictures of what looks like the perfect blond haired, blue eyed family full of kids. But what Hannah told me in her interview was that there was this crucial piece of information that they had actually withheld from the crowdfunding page and even not told friends in Allison's very close network. And that was that the person driving the car that hit Alison's son was her husband. He was backing up the car in a parking lot and accidentally hit their son. And this is, you know, as soon as any parent hears this story, it's like this visceral, like, oh my God, it's like the worst possible thing that you could imagine happening, right? And I don't think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily read that and like blame Allison or Hannah for the outcome that came about, but they felt like if they shared that information, people wouldn't be as willing to donate. And so they withheld it. And to the point where, you know, Hannah told me that she was deleting comments on Facebook, on their Facebook page and on the campaign page that asked questions about who the driver was or how it had happened that Beckett had been hit by this car. And so I think that kind of helps amplify just like the pressure that a lot of crowdfunders feel to be these sort of like perfect, ideal recipients who are uniquely deserving of this kind of assistance. And of course, that just goes completely counter to the moral system or the moral value system that would undergird like a more universal health insurance or health care system which would, no matter who's driving the car, this kid deserves to get healthcare. Right? And so I wanted to invite people to kind of reflect on that and to think a bit critically about what it's doing to us when we all sort of participate in these Types of moral economies.
B
Yeah, that's a really, again, very clear example of the way that this is working. And what obviously gives rise to the question of these platforms are often either advertising themselves or thought about in the sort of public mind as being ways to democratize access to support and healthcare. But given what you've told us, to what extent do they do that?
C
Yeah, this is a really important point because oftentimes the industry itself will use this term, democratization. They'll say things like, you know, crowdfunding is going to democratize charity. And, you know, crowdfunding has certainly radically changed charity and philanthropic practices. You know, data now shows that Americans are giving less to nonprofits and are more likely to give directly to other people in their networks. But I think to. To conflate that with democratization is really dangerous because, of course, who gets to participate, right? Not just who gets to give to other people, but also who gets to be seen as a legitimate recipient, as someone who can turn to the crowd and ask for help. And so this is where some of the more kind of quantitative research that we've done comes in, because it helps us to illustrate, you know, who's missing from this economy. So, for example, I worked with a grad student and another colleague, Aaron Davis and Shawna Carlisle, and what we did was we said, okay, well, let's look at the most successful medical crowdfunding campaigns on GoFundMe over time. And so we pulled about 800 that have raised more than $100,000. And we were just curious to see, like, okay, who's represented among this, like, viral, highly visible group of successful campaigns who's here? Overwhelmingly, it was young white men with cancer, and in particular, black women were grossly underrepresented. So out of that about 800 campaigns, only five were for black women. And two of those were actually started for black women by white people. And so I think what we can start to see here is the extent to which certain people are not equally accessing this social media economy, but also the extent to which a lot of people are either participating because they feel obligated to, because they have someone in their network who desperately needs help and they don't know how else to help them, or they're not able to participate because they don't have cash on hand to donate to others. And then, finally, I think it's important to ask, what do we not crowdfund for? So in the book, I talk a lot about how crowdfunding is what we in public health call a really downstream technology Right. So it catches people when they're already sort of drowning in the stream of illness and medical bills, and they're long past a point where we could have prevented things or reduced harm for a lot less money. We see this so often with crowdfunding campaigns for disasters or gun violence here in the United States. We often give to those campaigns out of a sense of guilt and lack of agency, rather than a sense that we're actually able to prevent those horrible things from happening in the future. And so I think the other thing that crowdfunding does is it really distracts us from what else we could do as a society, collectively and individually, to prevent these types of horrible situations from happening in the first place and prevent them in a more equitable way for all people in the society.
B
So much of this is very clearly structural and systemic. What difference then does it make for an individual within this system setting up a campaign? Like, do they have. Does an individual have any control over whether their campaign raises the money that they want, or is it all sort of down to these existing structures that they operate within?
C
Yeah, that's a really good question. And obviously one of the questions that a lot of people want me to answer, especially those who are trying to crowdfund, right? Which is like, can I. How can I be successful? How much can I be successful? And I think there's a couple different answers to this. First, it's a sort of weird fact of our Internet connected lives that certain things go viral and other things don't. And sometimes it's really hard to develop an explanatory logic for what makes certain things go viral. However, we do know that there are things that people can do or identities that people can have that can make their campaigns more likely to succeed. One of those is just having a really large social network, which, you know, itself is probably determined by a lot of structural factors. And then more importantly, having a social network that has a lot of people in it who have disposable income. And having access to media institutions like local news that can help spread the word is also quite helpful. And then we do see campaigns that tend to do better for particular types of people or particular types of characteristics, unfortunately. So, for example, in the book, I talk to Jesse, who actually works for a crowdfunding platform. And what Jesse's job is to do is to help people who have started campaigns to make them successful. And so Jesse is like the perfect person to understand what you can do and what you can't do. Right. And as I was talking to Jesse, you know, she told me a lot of things that help campaigns, but ultimately she was like, well, you know, it's really great if you're attractive and young, you know, or you have like a really tragic story. And she also said that at the end of the day, she has a lot of people asking her how they can make their campaign successful when they just really don't have a lot of people in their social network who have money that they can give to this person. And that's a really limiting factor. And I think that speaks back to some of these kind of hidden structural factors, because at the end of the day, so much of the success of a campaign has to do with who's in your network, who's willing to help you. And what we know from a lot of social science research is that people's networks tend to look like themselves. It's just like what we call homophily in social networks, right? And so if I am a fairly affluent white woman in a fairly highly educated area, it's quite likely that my social network is going to look like me. And in that case, my social network is going to do a lot better for me if I crowdfund than if I am a poor Latino immigrant in a rural area with high poverty rates.
B
Those are definitely, I think, some things that maybe anecdotally people would suspect is true. And then having this kind of research to back it up and being like, okay, so it really, there's a lot of it that is not necessarily down to the individual, at least not when we're looking at it in terms of who raises the money that they're aiming for. Is money, though the only success metric we can look at. I mean, sometimes people talk about these sorts of things as being more around the kind of traditional social media. It's about connection. It's about feeling like you're not alone. Are those things that people can get from these platforms, even if they don't necessarily raise money.
C
Most folks want to be able to reach out to someone who's struggling and offer them care, offer them help. And, and one of the things that these platforms do quite well is to make that easier, to make it smoother and faster, to be able to do that. So I spoke to people, for example, who lived far away from a family member, but they were able to set up a campaign for them and run the campaign for them, and that made them feel like they could help in tactile ways, even when they weren't able to be there in person and do some of the more in person, caregiving people also talked about how they felt like their campaigns allowed them to reach out to their social networks and let them know what was going on, help them understand the ups and downs of their illness or their health condition or crisis. So it is quite helpful in that regard. It can also be a bit of a double edged sword in that regard. So you can imagine someone like Trevor and the kinds of shame that he felt really inhibiting him from actually being able to reach out and connect with his network or explain to people what's going on. Similarly, I talked to people who were crowdfunding who, you know, withheld really bad news from their campaigns because they felt like their campaign should be positive and uplifting. Right, right. And that, like they shouldn't share bad news. But then because their campaign was the way that they were communicating with everyone in their network, they weren't really able to say, you know, today was a really bad day or we got really bad test results today and we're struggling. And so I think like many spaces of the Internet, the way that crowdfunding can cultivate a certain type of affect or narrative can also limit what people can express in that space and what kinds of help that they can access.
B
Yeah, that's a really important limitation to discuss. If we're talking then about the kind of bigger picture or the wider context in which these crowdfunding sites exist, as you've mentioned, they've really become a massive thing. You might have started off kind of, there weren't that many people researching this, but it's kind of hard to avoid these sites now. They're really all over the place. Is the prevalence doing anything to change wider societal ideas about sort of how the medical system works, or the structures that are stopping people from getting help or ideas for solutions? Or is the prevalence kind of not generating those sorts of thoughts?
C
I mean, this is really hard to measure. Right. And I don't want to just give you like a well, the vibes are answer, but let me say a couple of things. First, we have seen crowdfunding explode in popularity, not just in places like the US but across the world, especially in places that are missing essential social safety nets or have these really market driven healthcare systems. So crowdfunding is incredibly popular in places like China, in India, in South Africa. I've seen so many campaigns from Latin American countries where people are struggling to access healthcare. So it really is becoming a global phenomenon. And I also want to say that the more popular crowdfunding becomes, of course, just the more complex and competitive this marketplace becomes, I spoke a while back with sort of a person. I don't think they would like me describing them this way because they have lots of other attributes, but they are a highly online person and advocate and for extremely sick children. And, you know, five or 10 years ago, this person could get on Twitter and say, you know, this child is going to die if we don't get them X, Y or Z care right now and mobilize a ton of their followers to support a campaign and get it funded really quickly. And they told me recently that they just, just can't make that work any longer. They still have a huge following online, but they just can't break through the noise of how many campaigns are out there and how many appeals for need are happening at once. So that's one piece which is simply that the more we do this, the more normalized it becomes, the more competitive, the less likely it is that an average person will actually get help. You know, and it really is important for me to say that we have a grotesque misunderstanding of what the average campaign is like in medical crowdfunding. So in 2020, my colleague Mark Egro and I studied around 400,000 medical campaigns on GoFundMe. We found that in 2020, the median campaign raised $265 from five donors, and a third of campaigns were entirely unfunded. So this is a vast departure from what most Americans expect to get when they crowdfund. And I think that disparity between expectations and reality is another thing that's really fueling the continued embrace of crowdfunding. And then the last thing I want to say is that I think we're seeing a number of political shifts around the world towards really authoritarian regimes of governance, including in the US and some of the ethics of those regimes are shockingly similar to some of the ethics that we see on crowdfunding campaigns. And I'm not trying to say that crowdfunding fuels authoritarianism. But for example, about a year ago, when Trump was in the tail end of his reelection campaign, there were these horrific floods in the southeast in the United States. And Trump as presidential candidate started a huge GoFundMe campaign to benefit those communities. And then it seems by most measures that that campaign largely paid out to Trump allies and church groups and people aligned with his political values. And since coming into office, Trump has over and over again made decisions about who deserves assistance, whether it's state level assistance or FEMA assistance or anything else, largely based on political fealty. And I do think that it has amplified this idea that powerful people, whether powerful because of political position or because of the amount of money they have, have the right to decide who deserves help and who doesn't, and that the rest of us are sort of at the mercy of those people and their decisions, and that the best way that we can ensure our survival is to show fealty and almost like kowtow to these sort of powerful individuals. And I think that's a very, very dangerous notion of how societies should work when it comes to the inevitable crises that all of us face in our lives.
B
Are there any lessons then that can be taken from this work?
C
Well, I think there's a couple. Maybe I'll start with a good lesson, since I've shared a lot of somewhat dark data. I think one lesson from this work is that at the end of the day, a lot of people still have a very keen desire to figure out how to help each other out in times of need. That's a really amazing thing, and it's part of what's made crowdfunding so popular. But if you take the platform out of that equation, people are still trying to figure out how to support each other and how to meet each other's needs in what I would say is a particularly tough political and economic time. I think that we should be thinking about how we can harness those desires and ethics and turn them towards a somewhat more equitable set of choices about who we support and how. But you really do see the ethic of things like mutual aid, for example, in the US or in the UK really thriving. And I think part of the reason it's thriving, of course, unfortunately, is because so many people are struggling, but also because people have this real desire to do something to help each other out. And that gives me hope and I think fuels some of the newer work that I'm doing. And then the second is, you know, I think that particularly in public health, we have tended to not pay enough attention to tech platforms and the impacts that they can have on the health of populations. I hope that people take from this work maybe a reminder of how important it is to pay attention to digital environments and digital platforms as what we call in our field, like determinants of health. And then finally to recognize that platforms are not forever right. If you think about MySpace, for example, platforms come and go, and platforms change over time, and they change in response to consumer demand, to social demand. And so just because this crowdfunding platforms are a specific way right now with a specific set of affordances, doesn't mean that they will always be that way. And so I think I would remind all of us that we have the power to use these platforms differently, to call on them to be different. And I think what I've seen is that these platforms are quite responsive to those kinds of public critiques and demands.
B
That is, I think, a nicely optimistic or maybe optimistic note to do for you. I will take it. But before I let you go, you hinted there at future projects. So is there anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
C
Yeah. So I have two projects I'm working on right now, one I've been doing for a couple years now, which is a participatory research project with people with complex chronic illness and disability, looking at how communities cobble together care through a vast array of digital tools and platforms. So this really comes out of this work, but is trying to look a bit more strategically at how people sort of navigate these very fractured and complex care systems through the help of others and by connecting through platforms. And oftentimes what I'm talking about is not, you know, some specific platform made for people with a specific chronic illness, but I'm talking about Facebook groups and Reddit user groups and Google sheets and all these kinds of tools that have been sort of hacked and cobbled together in order to assist in care navigation. And so that project is an attempt to recognize and amplify the expertise that disability communities have created around how to use these tools, how to deploy them in creative and unique ways, but also an attempt to re inform the public health and medical fields about what an essential piece of the patient experience this is and how currently overlooked it is in the sort of biomedical care environment. So that's one, one, one project. And then I actually I'm, I'm currently a Carnegie Fellow, which is a fellowship program that invites scholars to think intensively about polarization. And my project is looking at digital polarization and public health in the United States. So really returning to some of those questions of the kind of ethics and kind of moral architecture of how Americans think about health insurance, health care, who deserves it, but really trying to come up with some solutions to the current extreme polarization that we experience in the US around core public health concerns.
B
Well, that certainly all sounds very intriguing. So best of luck with the different projects.
C
Well, thank you so much and thanks for having me on.
B
Well, if anyone wants to learn more about what we've been discussing, the book is titled Crowded the True Costs of Crowdfunding healthcare, published by MIT Press in 2024. Nora, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
C
Thanks for having.
Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Nora Kenworthy
Episode: Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare (MIT Press, 2024)
Release Date: October 30, 2025
This episode features Dr. Nora Kenworthy discussing her new book, Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare, which investigates the realities of using platforms like GoFundMe to pay for healthcare in the U.S. The conversation explores the hidden costs, inequities, and social implications of medical crowdfunding, revealing a system that reflects and amplifies broader structural issues rather than providing an equitable safety net.
Kenworthy’s work pulls back the curtain on the celebrated narrative of medical crowdfunding, laying bare deep-seated social inequalities and the limits of individualized charity in addressing health care needs. The episode closes with a cautious optimism: people’s drive to help each other is real, and both platforms and societal responses can evolve if the public demands more just alternatives.