If you are relying on a GoFundMe campaign to cover your medical bills, you may want to have a Plan B.
... [+] Not Plan B the medication but Plan B as in a different way to pay for your stay at the hospital, your visit to the emergency room, or your treatment at the clinic.found that from 2016 through 2020 less than 12% of such medical crowdfunding calls actually reached their goals. That clearly was not a good yield. If you ended up being fully clothed less than 12% of the time you went to work, you probably would no loner have a job.
This is in stark contrast with the feel-good stories that you occasionally hear on the news about people coming together to pay for someone’s medical bills. These numbers came from an analysis of the 437,596 GoFundMe campaigns for medical reasons that were launched in the U.S. during that five-year time period.
Now a quick glance at the overall numbers may make you feel warm all over in a “humanity is good” kind of way. Medically-related GoFoundMe campaigns raised a total of over $2 billion from around 21.7 million donations over the course of five years. But before you say, “humanity alone will overcome everything” and then take a sip of your Venti latte with half coconut milk, half 2%, 2.5 espresso shots, extra foam, and 1.5 raw sugars, take a closer look at the results from the study.
Indeed, the study showed that most campaigns were quite unsuccessful. Sure there was that one outlier campaign that raised $2.4 million from over 70,000 donors. But focusing on the few highly successful campaigns would be a bit like saying, “well, ifTV show can do it, why can’t I invite twenty people to my date and expect them to fight each other over me?” Instead, the study revealed that in actuality, many of the campaigns failed to raise anything.