GoFundMe and Healthcare
Or, Paul Ryan’s Inhuman Wet Dream, Quantified.
Yesterday, House Republicans passed H.R. 1628. They did not wait to read the bill. They did not wait for a CBO score. They did not listen to the near-unanimous chorus of medical care providers condemning the bill. Instead, under the leadership of Paul Ryan and in service to the demands of Donald Trump, they cobbled together a coalition of 217 Republicans to narrowly beat the challenge of 213 Democrats.
In it’s current form, this bill is a disaster. It decimates medical coverage for the sake of a tax cut. For everyone? No, for rich people. “Let them eat cake,” cry the House Republicans. What does it do for Trump’s supporters? Only one thing: it’s a direct attack on Barack Obama’s legacy, a perceived cultural victory. It will be poor comfort when they get sick; then, go bankrupt — or, worse.
The ACA — initially dubbed Obamacare by essentially everyone except then President Obama— defined essential health benefits; protected those with preexisting conditions; and, greatly extended coverage to the uninsured. It’s estimated that 20–24 million previously uninsured people now have health insurance, thanks to the ACA. At passage in 2010, every single Republican member of the House voted against it. Obama signed it into law two days later.
Currently, the majority of Americans approve of Obamacare. And, many people don’t understand that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing. Still, the ACA was far from perfect. Sick people still find themselves in a situation where they can’t afford their treatment; so, they end up bankrupt. Or, they can’t afford to be out of work while receiving treatment; so, they “choose” not to seek treatment, in the same way that a person with a gun to their head chooses to comply with demands of the person holding the gun. Obamacare’s greatest flaw: it didn’t go far enough. It does not provide universal coverage.
For some previously unreported supporting evidence, consider GoFundMe, the “#1 do-it-yourself fundraising website to raise money online.” The graph immediately below shows 205,675 people solicited and raised $808,480,289 USD to pay for medical-related expenses since 2011. That number is a gross underestimate for the GoFundMe figures (see the methodology section at the end); it covers only one website; and, it ignores traditional social fundraising like church collections. The obvious conclusion: people do not have enough money to access medical care when they need it.
The previous highlighted dollar amounts. But, it obscures the monstrous inhumanity. Speaking personally, I’ve been sick before. In 2004, at age nineteen, I had an extremely rare type of bone cancer called Chordoma located in the middle of my head. I know first hand the existential dread and endlessly-desolate days associated with being sick and receiving treatment. Will I die? Will it hurt? Oh god, when will the pain stop? But, I was extremely lucky. My parents had excellent health insurance. I never once thought, “how will I pay for this?” I can’t imagine doing so. Or, even worse, standing by unable to help someone you love, for lack of money. Even under the ACA, that is the reality people face. And, with remarkable cruelty, this new bill would make that the reality for even more Americans. The GOP claims, “we just can’t afford it.” They mean, “we [rich people] don’t care about you; we [rich people] won’t be affected; we [rich people] don’t want to pay for it; and, we [rich people] want lower taxes.” In your moment of greatest terror, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and the GOP want you to beg for your life.
Fuck that.
Fight to declare human decency as an incontestable American value.
Fight to end the hate machine that is the modern GOP.
Fight to end their tenure in office.
Fight for everyone.
Methodology
Following web conventions, GoFundMe provides a robots.txt page. This page declares which pages a robot may scrape, and which pages they may not. GoFundMe’s robots.txt did not prohibit scraping for any campaign pages.
Also following web conventions, GoFundMe provided a sitemaps.xmlfile listing their public-facing URLs. My crawler scraped all URLs in this collection. That is, I wrote a program to downloaded every html page referenced in that sitemap.
Afterwards, I wrote another program to process each of the downloaded pages. This means turning the html page into machine readable attributes like the campaign title; the story; the funds requested and funds raised, including the poster’s currency; what category the campaign self-tagged as; and, the campaign start date.
Using the extracted information, I then took the subset of all campaigns explicitly tagged as MEDICAL. I further limited this to campaigns that raised USD. Finally, I excluded campaigns that exceeded the 99.99th percentile of funds raised as a matter of data integrity. This means any amount raised greater than $255,669 USD was excluded. The final resulting subset represented approximately 17 percent of all campaigns.
I then computed statistics over the subset. The fundraisers raised an average of $3,930.86 per campaign, with a median value of $1,525 per campaign. About 7% of all fundraisers were unsuccessful in raising any money, although they had campaign pages. Since 2011 (but excluding 2017), there were 205,675 explicitly medical campaigns in this subset. The sum of the funds raised in this period was $808,480,289.
These numbers represent an underestimate — perhaps a severe one. Campaigns explicitly tagged as MEDICAL were 17.73% of all campaigns. This was the largest category, with MEMORIALS ranked second at 7.65%. Approximately 37.59% of the campaigns were untagged. I fully excluded this untagged set from analysis. Proper classification of this residual set would require advanced statistical methods. The resulting estimates for medical fundraising would be much larger, but subject to machine learning classification error. To avoid accusations of lying with statistics — people get confused by error bounds — I relied upon the explicit tagging alone.
