Her daughter is battling leukemia, so this Michigan mom is collecting cans for financial aid — 20 million Americans use crowdfunding for medical debt

Although Wolfe is on her husband’s insurance, WXYZ-TV reported, she is currently off work and caring for her four children, while also undergoing chemotherapy. Wolfe told WXYZ-TV that the out-of-pocket costs for the treatment amounted to thousands of dollars.

Detherage told WXYZ-TV she looked for creative ways to raise money after first thinking that she would sell her car but realizing that she “can only do that once” and wondering “what happens next month?”

So, Detherage asked on Facebook for community donations of empty cans and bottles to cover co-pays, lost income and regular bills, and the response was swift.

“You can get people who rally behind you, and it’s like a beautiful thing,” Wolfe told WXYZ-TV.

Detherage also organized a fundraiser at a bowling alley in Westland, and the family has set up a crowdfunding page to raise money for Wolfe’s medical costs.

“We’re trying to figure out ways to raise money for stuff without just begging for money,” Detherage told WXYZ-TV. “My goal is to keep my youngest child here with me so she can grow old and grow up and watch her children grow up.”

Fundraising for healthcare costs is commonplace

About 100 million Americans have medical debt, amounting to more than $220 billion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. An often-cited 2019 study found that as many as 66.5% of people who declared bankruptcy cited medical-related reasons, amounting to 530,000 bankruptcies annually in the U.S.

Millions of Americans have turned to fundraising or crowdfunding to help them try and tackle their medical costs.

A 2020 survey by the National Opinion Research Center found that eight million people said they had started a crowdfunding campaign for medical costs for themselves or a family member, with an additional 12 million people saying they’d started one for someone else. Meanwhile, 50 million American adults, 20% of the population, said they had donated to one.

Research from 2023 from the American Cancer Society reviewed 102,375 GoFundMe campaigns related to cancer from January 2022 to June 2023 alone. The study found that working cancer survivors 18 and older “frequently listed reasons for financial support needs included work disruption (90.9%), income loss (69.4%), and lack of sick leave (56.2%).” And among all adult cancer survivors, common reasons given for needing support included “struggles with expenses for medical treatments (47.5%) and for housing (5.2%), food (5.5%), and transportation (5.3%).”

University of Washington professor Nora Kenworthy, author of the book Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare, told Mother Jones that while people in countries with universal healthcare, such as Canada and the U.K., still resort to fundraising for medical costs, it’s typically for uncovered expenses, such as child care.

Kenworthy told Mother Jones that in the U.S., however, the amount of crowdfunding is “tremendous,” and it’s often for “things that are not covered by insurance, are covered inadequately, out-of-pocket costs that are incredibly high, or from people who are not insured, or underinsured, when they experience illness or accidents.”

Crowdfunding can be hit or miss

While many people do it, however, according to Kenworthy, a deep-rooted, “very extreme idea of individualism” in America makes crowdfunding for medical costs “a really difficult thing for people who most need it.”

“We have a very extreme idea of individualism, like, ‘If you can’t fix it, you’re kind of on your own,’” she said. “Or that the person with the most merit should win out, even when a lot of the ways that we measure merit are very much linked to privilege and racial identity and class identity and things like that.”