More Patients Employ Crowdfunding to Finance Their Eye Surgery

Crowdfunding, as a method to finance medical procedures, is gaining popularity around the world with the increase of the number of Crowdfunding platforms. Similar to every industry, not every Crowdfunding campaign aiming to fund medical procedures reaches its desired goal. Even when patients are in desperate need of money to get the surgery done, the reaction of people who might pledge may simply be indifference. Indeed in 2015, a couple who launched a Crowdfunding campaign on multiple platforms with the help of friends could not raise more than 15% of the required amount of money to perform eye surgery for their toddler. There are multiple factors to be considered to launch a successful Crowdfunding campaign. Among those factors are people’s values and national culture, level of wealth, and the extent to which backers may perceive a Crowdfunding campaign as a fraud.

In July 2021, baby Reyansh got her surgery performed with the support of donors through a Crowdfunding campaign that her father launched on ImpactGuru.com. Founders of CoFunD Health, the Crowdfunding platform dedicated to healthcare, claim that 75% of American families cannot afford a catastrophic health event and over 1 million of these struggling families annually share their stories on crowdfunding platforms hoping for assistance. CoFund Health is a personal crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money for medical expenses. Users Crowdfund for prescription medications, doctor and clinical visits, hospital stays, and insurance premiums. By visiting the search campaign page on CoFund Health website and typing “eye” in the search query a list of campaigns appears with procedures including raising money for cataract surgery, Lasik eye surgery, toddler eye surgery, Vitrectomy, etc.

Crowdfunding is a growing form of alternative financing and no doubt an effective tool to help people cover expensive medical procedures. Crowdfunding can support financing procedures that insurance providers consider as elective surgery like Lasik. Employees may have excellent employer-sponsored healthcare benefits but still cannot cover the cost of Lasik eye surgery which is usually excluded as some payers consider this to be similar to cosmetic surgery.