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Crowdfunding
300 words or more
Attached is the 5 resources for you to write your thesis statement.
· Write your introductory paragraph, identifying the thesis statement.
· Complete the chart below with a minimum of 5 additional resources that you have gathered for writing your research paper.
· Provide the references in APA format.
· Clearly explain the relevance of each resource to your thesis statement.
· Identify whether the resources are primary or secondary.
Basically,
You will need to write your introduction paragraph and identify your thesis statement. Then, you will need the five reliable sources I attached. Last, explain the relevance, and identify whether they are primary or secondary.
In this order.
Introductory paragraph. (Identify your thesis statement).
Then put the APA Reference.
Then explain the Relevance of each source to the thesis statement
Last tell why it is a Primary or secondary resource.
Go Fund Yourself: Paying for health care is now a popularity contest
Stephen Marche
Mother Jones.
43.1 (January-February 2018): p28+.
From Opposing Viewpoints In Context.
Copyright:
COPYRIGHT 2018 Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com
Full Text:
TWO DAYS AFTER receiving a diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer,
Marisa Rahdar had to figure out how to beg for her life. “I didn’t
want to do it at all,” she recalls. Rahdar is a 32-year-old bartender
from Detroit, and she has insurance. Her brother, Dante, the one in the
family who’s good with numbers, worked out the amount she’d need to
cover her out-of-pocket medical expenses and take a break from serving beer
so she could rest up after chemotherapy. The number he came up with was
$25,000. Next came the pitch. That job fell to Dante, too. He chose
YouCaring.com, rather than another crowdfunding site, because he’d
recently seen a campaign posted on GoFundMe.com by a guy trying to raise
money for potato salad; he didn’t want to post his sister’s
suffering beside practical jokes. The pitch was brief:
My sister, Marisa Rahdar, was diagnosed with breast cancer on
March 16th of 2017. Through the testing phase she has also been diagnosed
with cancer located in her lymph nodes and tailbone. This upcoming week she
will begin radiation and meet with her team of doctors at Troy Beaumont to
finalize a plan of action for her treatment. In the meantime, we have
estimated her medical expenses not covered by her insurance, as well as her
living expenses during the time of her treatment. We will update this site
during her treatment so you can all get a small sample of that famous Marisa
“charm.” For those concerned, her eyebrows remain unsullied.
By now, almost everybody has seen pleas for help covering urgent
medical bills in their Facebook feeds. With health care costs and
high-deductible plans on the rise for more than a decade, medical expenses
are the largest single cause of bankruptcies nationwide. Despite
Obamacare’s efforts to rein in costs, the average deductible on a
typical plan under the Affordable Care Act is $2,550–nearly as much as the
entire monthly take-home pay of the average American worker. President Donald
Trump’s efforts to destabilize Obamacare have already raised premiums,
and experts predict the cost of a deductible under some versions of
Republican health care legislation would rise to an average of at least
$4,100. Meanwhile, according to the Federal Reserve, 44 percent of Americans
in 2016 didn’t have so much as $400 saved up in the event of an
emergency.
Health care in America is the wedge of inequality: It’s the
luxury everyone has to have and millions can’t afford. Sites like
YouCaring have stepped in to fill the gap. The total amount in donations
generated by crowdfunding sites has increased elevenfold since the appearance
of Obamacare. In 2011, sites like GoFundMe and YouCaring were generating a
total of $837 million. Three years later, that number had climbed to $9.5
billion. Under the Trump administration, YouCaring expects donations to jump
even higher, and the company has already seen an estimated 25 percent spike
since the election, which company representatives believe is partly a
response to the administration’s threats to Obamacare.
Crowdfunding companies say they’re using technology to help
people helping people, the miracle of interconnectedness leading to
globalized compassion. But an emerging consensus is starting to suggest a
darker, more fraught reality–sites like YouCaring and GoFundMe may in fact
be fueling the inequities of the American health care system, not fighting
them. And they are potentially exacerbating racial, economic, and educational
divides. “Crowdfunding websites have helped a lot of people,”
medical researcher Jeremy Snyder wrote in a 2016 article for the Hastings
Center Report, a journal focused on medical ethics. But, echoing other
scholars, he warned that they’re “ultimately not a solution to
injustices in the health system. Indeed, they may themselves be a cause of
injustices.” Crowdfunding is yet another example of tech’s best
intentions generating unseen and unfortunate outcomes.
The night Rahdar’s brother, Dante, wrote the pitch, she
looked it over. She liked the title he’d given it–“Help Marisa
Kick Cancer in the Teeth”–and the crack about the eyebrows, and so she
told him, sure, go ahead and post it. But then she and Dante paused. They
burst out laughing. It was April 1,2017. They agreed to post it the next day.
They didn’t want her suffering confused with an April Fools’ joke.
IN THE LATE 19th and early 20th centuries, many Americans relied
on charity for their health care needs. After the Civil War, middle-class
do-gooders moved into impoverished communities and established settlement
houses, where low-income residents could get medical care and other social
services. Separately, thousands of fraternal societies organized by
ethnicity, religion, and age offered payments when someone was sick and
covered funeral costs when he or she died. The limits of this patchwork
system–the settlement houses fragmented as the social-work industry
professionalized, and the fraternal societies mostly covered working-age men
while excluding women, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities–helped
give rise to the Progressive movement and, eventually, the New Deal and the
modern-day panoply of social-insurance benefits. When President Lyndon
Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965, former President Harry
Truman made a cameo to celebrate the state’s replacement of charities as
providers of key services. “Not one of these, our citizens, should ever
be abandoned to the indignity of charity,” Truman told the crowd.
“Charity is indignity when you have to have it.”
But within less than 30 years, a conservative backlash profoundly
redefined and reasserted the role of charity in American politics. Ronald
Reagan’s notorious campaign against the “welfare queen” helped
make government programs synonymous with graft. Volunteerism was soon pushed
as an alternative. “We’re not advocating private initiatives and
voluntary activities as a halfhearted replacement for budget cuts,” he
told a group of businesspeople in 1981. “We advocate them because
they’re right in their own regard. They’re a part of what we can
proudly call ‘the American personality.'”
By the 1990s, the idea that government-run welfare programs would
damage the charitable impulses of the nation had become fully entrenched in
right-wing thinking, most explicitly in Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of
American Compassion, a significant influence on Newt Gingrich, among others.
To adherents of this idea, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and cash
assistance programs were all legal plunder–immoral distractions from
individual philanthropic impulses.
Obamacare, a program whose details were partly inspired by Stuart
Butler, a former director of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage
Foundation, displays a contradictory mix–with elements of both the
Johnsonian welfare state ethic and conservative skepticism about the
state’s right and ability to provide social insurance directly to
citizens. The Affordable Care Act expanded coverage and protections to 20
million Americans, but it relied on private companies to administer care,
allowing insurers to make a profit on the package that Obamacare required
patients to purchase. At the same time, it provided government subsidies for
those who couldn’t afford insurance. As such, it was a sort of
Frankenstein between a for-profit and a social benefit, designed in part to
appease both progressives and hostile Republican lawmakers. The result has
been that more people have access to health care and insurance companies have
experienced a “profit spiral,” making billions of dollars, even
while premiums for many middle-class constituencies, in addition to high
deductibles, can cost more than $1,000 per month.
When YouCaring first started in 2011, a year after the passage of
the aca, its founders unknowingly inherited this contradictory legacy. Three
friends, Brock Ketcher, Naomi Ketcher, and Luke Miner, founded YouCaring
after two years spent on religious missions abroad. The original purpose was
to help students raise money for college, but they soon began hosting other
charitable fundraising campaigns and then medical campaigns. By April 2013,
they were attracting as many as 87,000 unique users daily, raising more than
$180,000 a day. Today medical campaigns bring in the largest volume of
YouCaring donations, more than $900 million in total since 2011. Last March,
the company acquired GiveForward.com, another charitable crowdfunding site
founded in 2008.
The first YouCaring campaign to pass $1 million was a 2014
memorial for Riley Sandler, a nine-year-old girl who died of respiratory
arrest at camp. Massive successes of campaigns like that one spread the word
and elevated YouCaring’s brand. This past August, football star J.J.
Watt’s YouCaring campaign to raise money for survivors of Hurricane
Harvey in Houston passed its initial goal of $200,000 in a couple of hours.
He has now raised $37 million.
YouCaring, along with GoFundMe and their competitors, addressed a
real need: With faltering budgets in schools and welfare services, people
used the programs to fill in the gaps imposed by years of economic austerity.
Today, there’s DonorsChoose, which allows users to raise money for
public schools. Meal Train raises cash for food. Plumfund raises money for
life events like pregnancies and honeymoons. GiveForward has prevented 4
percent of all medical bankruptcies.
And make no mistake, the profits are potentially lucrative.
GoFundMe charges 5 percent to every donation, plus 30 cents and another 2.9
percent for the transaction fee. (Indiegogo and Kickstarter charge similar
fees.) With a total of more than $4 billion raised, that puts GoFundMe’s
profits in the range of $200 million.
YouCaring doesn’t charge anything to recipients but asks for
a tip from every donor. In 2014, the company was acquired by the private
equity firm Alpine Investors, whose portfolio includes about 13 other
technology companies. YouCaring representatives declined to discuss their
revenue or business model with me, but Ethan Mollick, a professor at the
Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, believes they are likely
playing a long game–forgoing user fees and profits for now in order to
capture a larger market share from their competitors. “It’s not an
unusual strategy to burn through cash,” Mollick says. “GoFundMe is
winning. They charge their fee, and YouCaring is competing with them. The
winners take all.”
In their competitive race for donations, these companies combine
the old spirit of American charity with the modern dynamics of the
21st-century tech economy. Regardless of whether Obamacare survives another
three or seven years of Trump or is replaced with something else entirely,
one thing is certain: As health care becomes more expensive and resources
become more unequally distributed, the crowd may become the insurer of last
resort.
THE YOUCARING office on California Street in downtown San
Francisco is all open spaces and white and wood, like a massive condo.
Windows on the 12th floor cast rays of sun onto Bertoia-style chairs where
about 30 people work in glass-walled cubicles, clacking away on computers and
perfecting algorithms.
Maly Ly, the chief marketing officer, met me in the foyer.
Ly’s own story represents a version of the tech Utopian dream. A refugee
from Cambodia, she is now building the future. Arriving in the United States
after members of her family were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, she says she
was initially held captive by a religious cult and then moved to a house
where she, her grandmother, her aunt, and her uncle worked as domestics
without pay. When Ly was nine, a couple from Georgia helped extricate them
and enrolled Ly in school. “Because of their compassion, 1 was
saved,” she says. “We see that kind of compassion every day on our
site.” Eventually Ly came to run product development for Lucasfilm, the
makers of the Star Wars movies, and she believes YouCaring is involved in a
similar type of storytelling–helping people sell their illness as a
“narrative of the hero’s journey.”
Ly introduced me to Jesse Boland, the director of online
marketing. “What works is coming up with a very clear ask of your
network,” Boland said, explaining that soliciting money on YouCaring
relies on the same tools as any kind of digital marketing. “Outlining
what are you asking and why are you asking for it.” Funding an animal
shelter is more difficult than funding dogs, one by one. To apply the lesson:
Users shouldn’t say they need $10,000; they should say that if they
receive $100 today, they can go on living.
The quantity and quality of the information matter, too. Images
help. So does a continuous stream of information, just like on the most
popular Twitter or Instagram accounts. People want to come back to the story,
to find out what happens, Boland said, to see how their money has changed
somebody’s life. Timing matters, too. The best times to post a campaign
are “around lunchtime and after dinner during the week,” he said,
and “earlier in the week is better.” Don’t panic because
you’ve been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and throw up your
campaign at midnight.
Many users intuitively grasp the rules. Take Shelly Vaughn, a
GoFundMe user from Ohio. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, her
friends Christopher and Aubree Uhler asked for $6,000 to help pay the bills
during her treatments. They met their goal in five days, ultimately earning
$15,411. “It’s a testament to Shelly, and her personality,”
Christopher told me when I talked to him on the phone. Of course,
Shelly’s bio helped. She’s a children’s speech therapist at a
local hospital, a young mother, a marathon runner, a member of a local
church. “We basically flipped a switch,” Christopher said, meaning
that as soon as they asked, the money came pouring in.
But 90 percent of GoFundMe campaigns fail to meet their target,
according to a small study by Lauren Berliner and Nora Kenworthy, professors
at the University of Washington. They believe that the need for online
marketing skills is one of crowdfunding’s most pernicious features.
Successful crowdfunding requires that campaigners master so-called medical
and media literacies–they must be savvy online marketers of their own
tragedy.
Because online marketing skills and large social networks
correlate strongly with income, say Berliner and Kenworthy, crowdfunding
reproduces inequality. The well-off earn more money on YouCaring than the
poor because in general they already have the skills and the friends required
to raise money.
“This isn’t a replacement for health care,” Ly
acknowledged. “This isn’t going to solve everyone’s
problems.”
IT TURNS OUT Marisa Rahdar was naturally good at crowdfunding:
$1,200, $4,750, $9,500–the amount she raised kept going up. Her campaign was
run like a good social-media account. She was clever, self-deprecating. Even
in suffering, Rahdar was charming.
But the thing about suffering is that, most of the time, it’s
not charming. Chronic conditions are especially unglamorous, which is why few
get results on crowdfunding sites. The story people want to hear is that
they’re giving you money and you’ll get better right away and
return to being a contributing member of society. A search for lupus,
Crohn’s disease, or fibromyalgia campaigns turns up a lot of folks who
have raised next to nothing. And that’s not even mentioning diseases or
health procedures you won’t find many campaigns for: sexually
transmitted diseases or abortions. YouCaring allows campaigns for these, but
they are almost never successful. (Until recently, GoFundMe banned abortion
campaigns entirely.) Snyder, in the Hastings Center Report, argues that
socially stigmatized health issues are typically less compelling to donors,
and that restrictions, such as GoFundMe’s ban on abortion campaigns,
“point to the potential for these private companies to decide to
restrict fundraising in politically sensitive areas.”
By unwittingly rewarding certain types of illnesses over others,
crowdfunding sites risk amplifying people’s prejudices about the
“deservingness and worth” of users, as Berliner and Kenworthy put
it.
Preventive and long-term care also tend to garner few donations.
“Crisis stories work so much better than chronic stories,” Daryl
Hatton, ceo of FundRazr, another crowdfunding site, explained to me. He
pointed out that dramatic stories succeed over staid ones–particularly
effective are “some of the traditional Shakespearean story arcs, where
you start off with an introduction, something [tragic] happens, and then
there’s the moment of epiphany.”
When I emailed Khy Jones, the founder of the Brown Baby Brigade, a
new 501(c)(3) group based near Tampa, Florida, I saw how these trends might
play out. Jones’ nonprofit aimed to increase the breastfeeding rates for
women of color by community outreach. The group had failed to raise a single
dollar. “The crazy thing is the community of people we service
can’t afford to donate,” Jones told me.
By all measures, Brown Baby Brigade offers a socially valuable
service. About 76 percent of white women sometimes breastfeed their children,
compared with 58 percent of black women, a significant discrepancy given
breastfeeding’s lifetime health advantages for mothers and infants –it
has been shown to improve outcomes for conditions as diverse as depression
and diabetes. But the story doesn’t sell.
This prioritizing of the sensational seems to be replicated
nationwide, as more and more people donate to YouCaring and other
crowdfunding sites instead of traditional charities. Since the 2008
recession, when one of the first crowdfunding sites, GiveForward, was
founded, charitable giving has declined precipitously, and the propensity to
give dropped 6 percent between 2000 and 2012. Meanwhile crowdfunding has
exploded. The relationship isn’t causal, but it does signal an alarming
shift in people’s priorities and the way they give: away from the
community, toward the individual.
Racial disparities also appear to be reproduced on crowdfunding
sites, in large part because racial and economic inequalities often overlap.
For example, African Americans tend to have less wealthy social networks, and
therefore fewer resources available to draw from in times of crisis.
It’s anecdotal but striking that a quick way to find a lot of failed
campaigns, and very few successful ones, is to search for “sickle cell
anemia,” a disease that disproportionately affects people of African
heritage.
By rewarding dramatic stories over logical public health policies,
YouCaring and its competitors encourage “a shift in funding priorities
and the distribution of resources for medical care away from the need for or
efficient use of resources by the recipient,” says Snyder.
“Instead, medical resources for crowdfunding campaigns are largely
distributed according to personal appeal, sensationalism, and one’s
social position or luck.”
I called Kaneisha Northern, a 35-year-old in Atlanta who suffered
from multiple sclerosis. Northern, an African American woman, had a lot of
overlapping disadvantages. She had moved around a lot, and her social network
skewed toward the less wealthy side. She had an unglamorous chronic illness,
with almost no chance of full recovery. “It’s so difficult,”
she told me. “You go from being this independent go-with-the-flow kind
of person to being disabled, being unable to do for yourself.”
Before Northern fell sick and moved to Georgia, she ran a charity
called Grad Girls Network that helped underprivileged girls in Los Angeles.
Now, her medical insurance wouldn’t cover the rehabilitation program she
wanted to undertake at the Shepherd Center, a well-respected clinic. She had
requested $47,000 on her YouCaring page so she could get back into rehab, and
she had raised a decent amount, $8,455, but it wasn’t nearly enough to
pay out of pocket to attend physical therapy. Crowdfunding, she said, was not
working for her, at least not yet. “It’s still ongoing,” she
said.
LAST SUMMER, I met Marisa Rahdar in Thomas Magee’s Sporting
House, a gritty joint just off the Fisher Freeway in Detroit. Rahdar used to
tend bar there, and when she fell sick her customers and friends rallied to
help her out.
Rahdar’s arms display bold tattoos: flamingos draped around
apple blossoms, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a beer ringed by a halo. Her
curly hair, black to the chin and blond past it, would soon be sacrificed to
chemo. Rahdar’s friends had organized a fundraiser in the bar for her
cancer treatment. “It sucks to be brought up in this way of being proud
to be in this country,” she told me. “And all the amazing things
that you have, and I gotta fucking beg people for money to make sure I can
pay a light bill.”
At Thomas Magee’s, they came up with a lot of cute tricks to
raise cash: music and booze and a 50-50 raffle–half the money would go to
the winner and half to Rahdar. The biggest prizes were a basket full of
donated Lot 40 Whisky and a Tucker Torpedo, the beautiful 1948 car of which
only 51 were ever made. The organizers even reserved a parking space out
front for the ultrarare Tucker–you know, like the car was about to pull up
any minute–but it turned out to be a tiny toy car, not the real thing. The
joke raised a good deal of cash anyway. The man who won the 50-50 donated his
earnings. Fellow members of the Detroit bartenders’ guild, forgotten
regulars, exboyfriends–all came out to give. Rahdar saw people she
hadn’t seen since she was 18. One friend forked over $1,800.
Rahdar has what sociologists call a “deep social
network,” that alchemic mix that makes people want to help her out.
Newfangled charity and old-fashioned charity, it turns out, tend to draw on
the same resources–a community with enough money to donate; popularity;
living in a city; having a sympathetic disease and story about that disease.
(Breast cancer is the most common cancer in America, and it’s one of the
most popular types of medical campaigns on YouCaring.) In that Detroit
barroom, the 19th century and the 21st collided. “There are times when I
feel bad that I’ve had success in this and other people are
faltering,” Rahdar said. I asked her why the people she knew were so
generous and her government wasn’t. “The people who are like
this”–she pointed to the bartenders–“aren’t the ones in
charge.”
AFTER LEAVING Detroit, I revisited Kaneisha Northern’s
YouCaring page. It was mostly quiet, with little activity save for a few
friends chiming in to offer good wishes. Her earnings seemed to have stalled
out at the $8,455 mark and hadn’t increased in weeks. Then I went to her
Facebook page and saw that she had died. She was 35 years old.
It happened in the morning. Seated in her wheelchair beside her
bed, she had called out to her mother for help, according to a neighbor, and
by the time her mother arrived she had passed. No one had expected her to
deteriorate so quickly–she’d been hoping to raise money to attend rehab
for her multiple sclerosis, after all.
“I’m still trying to hang in there and go strong with
it,” Northern had told me before her death. The emotional experience of
crowdfunding, she lamented, was one of the greatest cruelties in her
ordeal–the sense of needing to rely on other people’s generosity, the
feeling of not quite measuring up. “It hasn’t really given me what
I hoped for.”
If you’re looking for monsters, you won’t find them at
YouCaring.com or any of the other crowdfunding sites that are rising to fill
the ever-widening cracks in the American health care system. It’s just
that the marketplace of compassion, which is what crowdfunding sites amount
to, produces winners and losers like any other marketplace. America is
becoming a country so free that everyone must beg to survive, and most will
not beg well enough.
In November, I visited a new crowd-funding page that had been set
up for Northern, this one on GoFundMe. Titled “A Tribute to Kaneisha
Northern,” it is, if you follow the recommendations of social-media
marketing experts, not a very good campaign. There’s no text, no story,
just a photo of her face and the title, without details or information about
her death. It has raised $2,312 so far.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright
restrictions.
Caption: Marisa Rahdar’s co-workers and friends helped her
raise more than $17,000 for cancer treatment.
Source Citation
(MLA 8th Edition)
Marche, Stephen. “Go Fund Yourself: Paying for health care is now a popularity contest.” Mother Jones, Jan.-Feb. 2018, p. 28+. Opposing Viewpoints In Context, http://link.galegroup.com.prx-herzing.lirn.net/apps/doc/A520055747/GPS?u=lirn50909&sid=GPS&xid=2d715344. Accessed 6 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number:
GALE|A520055747
Crowding Out Medical Bills: People donate billions online
Marty Cook
Arkansas Business.
34.42 (Oct. 16, 2017): p11.
From Small Business Collection.
Copyright:
COPYRIGHT 2017 Journal Publishing, Inc.
http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/
Full Text:
Ashley Goodwin wondered if it would be better to let the virulent
cancer that had invaded his body just go ahead and kill him.
Death, as hard as it was to contemplate for the family man, would
be much less of a financial burden than the bills generated by fighting the
nearly incurable cancer he was diagnosed with in May 2016. His daughter,
Georgia, was set to start college at the University of Arkansas at
Fayetteville, and his son, Jacob, was in high school.
“I was looking at, am I going to live to see her graduate?
Are we going to be able to afford college?” said Goodwin, who was
diagnosed with dedifferentiated retroperitoneal liposarcoma, a soft-tissue
cancer in his abdominal cavity. “I didn’t want to put my family in
a financial position where they can’t survive. I have life insurance and
all that good stuff; it’s kind of sick to look at it that way. It’s
sad but you seriously start thinking that way: if I just go ahead and hurry
up and die.”
Goodwin, a salesman with Consolidated Electrical Distribution in
Springdale, and his wife have annual income of approximately $100,000 but
still had to turn to the internet and his network of friends and
acquaintances to help foot his unexpected medical bills to cover costs his
wife’s family health insurance didn’t. Kelly Hale Syer, executive
director of the Downtown Springdale Alliance, helped write up a GoFundMe
campaign for Goodwin in hopes of raising $10,000.
GoFundMe and other crowd-funding platforms have become more
popular in recent years as sources of funds for people’s medical bills.
Approximately half of GoFundMe campaigns are created to provide for the
medical expenses of the beneficiary.
The campaign was a success, raising more than $13,000. On paper,
the amount seems minuscule because Goodwin’s medical bills and hospital
stays total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars with no end in sight.
Goodwin used that money for travel expenses since his cancer was
rare enough to require the expert oncology services at Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Goodwin, who has had two surgeries to
remove cancerous masses, was scheduled to undergo another surgery late last
week at Sloan Kettering. What the surgeons remove–and Goodwin fears they
will need to remove part of his intestines–will determine how long he will
remain in New York in recovery.
Crowdfunding Health
GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform founded in 2010, has helped
people raise more than $3 billion since its founding. The Chronicle of
Philanthropy, a trade publication based in Washington that covers nonprofit
philanthropies, reported that GoFundMe campaigns raised more than $1 billion
in a one-year stretch in 2015; only nine charities ranked by the Chronicle
raised more private money.
The percentages of medical-related campaigns are similar for
YouCaring, another crowd-funding platform that was formed in San Francisco in
2011. Earlier in 2017, YouCaring acquired GiveForward, a crowd-funding
platform that benefited medical needs nearly 70 percent of the time.
“Whether it’s Obamacare of Trumpcare, the weight of
health care costs on consumers will only increase,” YouCaring CEO Dan
Saper told media company Bloomberg in June. “It will drive more people
to try and figure out how to pay health care needs, and crowdfunding is in
its early days as a way to help those people.”
Platforms such as GoFundMe and YouCaring allow people to donate
online to a fund to benefit a specific person or project. GoFundMe charges 5
percent of donations plus a 2.9 percent fee to process the payment, while
YouCaring charges only the payment processing fee.
Crowdfunding has become more widespread. Startup businesses use
platforms to raise capital, and students use them to raise money for school
supplies, scholarship funds or travel expenses.
“It’s pretty darn prevalent,” said Heather Joslyn,
assistant managing editor of the Chronicle, who noted that GoFundMe campaigns
tend to benefit individuals.
Crowdfunding “has been growing pretty quickly; it definitely
started sort of on the margins. Crowdfunding seems best suited to specific
projects,” she said.
Joslyn said crowdfunding campaigns seem to work better when
potential donors feel a sense of urgency in the giving. The Pew Research
Center, in a 2016 report, found that 22 percent of people have donated to a
crowdfunding campaign, more than had participated in a ride-sharing platform
such as Uber or a home-sharing platform such as Airbnb.
The Pew research also showed that a majority of donors–87
percent–participated in five or fewer campaigns, and 62 percent donated $50
or less. Sixty-eight percent of the donations were done in order to help a
specific person or project.
Personal Project
Goodwin, 49, said starting a crowdfunding campaign was a hard
decision to make because he grew up when a person’s financial situation
was not something that was shared publicly. But he said he was shocked at how
cancer had upended his “solid middle-class” comfort.
“All of a sudden, 20 percent of your income is going to
something you didn’t plan on,” Goodwin said. “It affects
things. I’m a salesman; I need to be in front of my customers to get my
job done. That’s hard to do when you have a [chemotherapy] needle in my
arm.
“It’s very humbling. Just to ask is humbling. I make
decent money and I had to go to GoFundMe.”
Goodwin said it’s not so much the medical bills because,
through his wife Dawn’s job at Nestle USA in Rogers, the family has very
good health insurance. That pays for the $20,000 monthly chemotherapy, which
has proved to be ineffective against his cancer, and the regular and
expensive CT scans and MRIs to keep track of his cancer’s growth.
“I was going to live to be 90 and all that good stuff,”
Goodwin said. “All of a sudden, boom, your world has changed. It’s
a massive worry. That’s the big fear for me. My daughter mentioned one
time about going to the doctor and not wanting to spend the money.
“It’s a little humbling when your kids are acting like
that. That is some of the thoughts that I know have gone through their
minds.”
Goodwin has already lost a kidney to the disease and said the
five-year survival rate for his cancer is approximately one in four. The odds
do not improve after that because liposarcoma keeps coming back and, Goodwin
said, it will invade an organ he can’t live without.
“It’ll kill me, eventually,” Goodwin said. “I
can’t leave my family destitute. At what point do you decide to no
longer have treatment? It’s a quality of life issue and an economics
issue.”
By Marty Cook
MCook@ABPG.com
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright
restrictions.
Source Citation
(MLA 8th Edition)
Cook, Marty. “Crowding Out Medical Bills: People donate billions online.” Arkansas Business, 16 Oct. 2017, p. 11. Small Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com.prx-herzing.lirn.net/apps/doc/A513852448/GPS?u=lirn50909&sid=GPS&xid=77bba19a. Accessed 6 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number:
GALE|A513852448
Example
Introductory paragraph
3-D printing technology has begun to take off in the world, especially in the developed world, but there is still space for development in terms of innovation, adaptability, and acceptability for its eventual widespread use. One of the areas that is anticipated to grow as a result of 3-D printing is the global supply chain. The impact of 3-D printing on international supply chain lies in specific components.
Now that the logistics characterizing international supply chains are the reason for the inefficiencies of the international market, components such as world transport, storage, and manufacturing are the issues of concern to understand the impact of 3-D printing.
Literature concerning the impact of 3-D printing on the international supply chain tends to be more concerned with the reflow in the manufacturing sector and supply chain transformations. Indeed, 3-D printing has the potential to reduce freight volumes, which would in turn impact the logistics industry in global trade. The discussions do not, however, focus on the vital aspect of quantitatively assessing the impact of 3-D printing so that the magnitude of transport variations and trends arising from 3D printing are known in clear terms. Even research focusing on geographical distribution tends to analyze freight volumes without due attention to vital metric such as time consumption. The international supply chain comprises of Asian countries as main manufacturers, while the North American and European countries specialize in research and development (R &D) and sales. The focus for this research is to determine how 3-D printing may cause a decline in freight volumes from Asia, and a potential resultant rise in freight volumes of Europe and North America.
The study explains the need for and the importance of supply chain reconstruction. Researchers and academics often discuss the impact of supply chain reconstruction on global supply chains. One of the ways to reconstruct the global supply chain is through innovative practices such as 3-D printing. While it is envisioned that 3-D printing has the potential to make global trade efficient and cheaper for the consumer, the specific aspects that will change directly as a result of 3-Dprinting need to be the major focus of research. The dissemination of information on how 3-Dprinting will impact the logistics activities, the level of inventory, and the global freight volume is required.
Thesis
3-D printing technology, also called additive manufacturing, has the potential to improve international supply chain through such changes as dematerializing it, creating a customized just-in-time manufacturing cycle, reducing the setup and changeover time and cost, and the number of assembles. While it could be a disruptive technology that would replace the manner in which supply chains are configured in traditional production, it is the future of international trade as a source of significant value chain.
APA Reference
Relevance to the thesis
Primary or secondary resource
Bhasin, V., & Bodla, M. R. (2014). Impact of 3D printing on global supply chains by 2020 (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Impact on global economy
Secondary
Birtchnell, T., & Urry, J. (2016). A new industrial future?: 3D printing and the reconfiguring of production, distribution, and consumption. Routledge.
Effects on manufacturing
Primary
Carr, C., & Gibson, C. (2016). Geographies of making: Rethinking materials and skills for volatile futures.Progress in Human Geography, 40(3), 297-315.
Materials used for 3D Printing
Secondary
Credence Research (2016). 3D Printing Materials Market is Expected to Reach $2.3 Billion By 2022. https://prx-herzing.lirn.net/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1798953276?accountid=167104
Market value for 3D Printing
Primary
Hexa Research (2015). 3D Printing Market is Projected as a Challenge to the Growth of the Market over the Forecast Period 2020. http://www.hexaresearch.com/research-report/3d-printing-industry/
Materials used for 3D Printing
Primary
