GoFundMe started as a crowdfunding site for underwriting “ideas and dreams,” and, as GoFundMe’s co-founders, Andrew Ballester and Brad Damphousse, once put it, “for life’s important moments.” In the early years, it funded honeymoon trips, graduation gifts, and church missions to overseas hospitals in need. Now GoFundMe has become a go-to platform for patients trying to escape medical billing nightmares.
One study found that, in 2020, the annual number of U.S. campaigns related to medical causes — about 200,000 — was 25 times the number of such campaigns on the site in 2011. More than 500 current campaigns are dedicated to asking for financial help for treating people, mostly kids, who have spinal muscular atrophy, a neurodegenerative genetic condition. The recently approved gene therapy for young children with the condition, by the drugmaker Novartis, has a price tag of about $2.1 million for the single-dose treatment.
So, everyone acknowledges that consolidating risk benefits from natural hedges, a large purchaser of services has greater bargaining power and that centralising service provision enables accumulating knowledge and efficiencies. This is all evidenced in the private sector and consolidation. However, when it comes to healthcare risk pools have to be split, services are provided by multiple providers with limited information available on risks covered and additional admin layers are brought in to manage the embedded inefficiencies from a poorly designed system.
The level of removedation of privatised healthcare beggars belief.