MEZIESBLOG

Costs to cover

Table 5 shows the 15 most frequent health-related costs for which individuals requested funding on Leetchi. The last column of Table 5 provides some additional information on the cost element. As shown in Table 5, the most frequent medical expense individuals aimed to cover from the donations was related to therapy; financial support for therapy was requested in almost one-fourth of the campaigns (n = 90; 23.68%). The second most frequent cost type for which individuals asked for donations were living expenses (n = 77, 20.26%). Living expenses might manifest in various forms, such as paying bills or a rental fee, obtaining a driving licence, house renovation, car costs for going to the doctor or work, removing mould professionally, and leisure activities. Typically, the underlying health problem put such a heavy burden on families, partly due to lost income, partly due to financing additional medications and therapies, that they turned to the crowd to ease their financial burden.

In one-tenth of the campaigns, individuals requested financial support for an institution (n = 39, 10.26%). Almost as popular were requests for donations to facilitate patients’ mobility (n = 37; 9.74%). Families also often asked for donations for medication (n = 30, 7.89%), arguing that drug costs put heavy burden on their budget in addition to the burden of the disease, disorder or condition.

Treatment for foreigners and treatment abroad

Regarding geographic coverage, the huge majority of crowdfunding campaigns did not list any country, city or nationality in the campaign description (n = 304, 80%). These projects were typically posted by residents to fund health care services delivered in their neighbourhood in Germany. In total, almost 13% of crowdfunding projects (n = 49, 12.89%) involved a foreign country for reasons other than holidays; funding was requested either for patients residing abroad and thus not covered by the German health insurance fund (n = 31), or for a health initiative in a developing country (n = 18). Developing countries were involved in 35 out of the 49 projects; countries within the European Economic Area (EU, Norway and Switzerland) were mentioned in five crowdfunding projects; other European countries, e.g. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia, and Turkey were mentioned in eight crowdfunding campaigns. High-income countries outside Europe were mentioned in only one crowdfunding campaign; an individual sought funding for medical intervention offered in the USA only. Although the underlying conditions varied greatly, for non-resident patients the three most frequent conditions included cancer (n = 12), transplants (n = 5) and accidents (n = 4).

Donations were asked for treatment abroad in 27 out of 380 cases (7.11%). Typically, individuals asked for donations to finance therapy not available in Germany (n = 12), such as Adeli-therapy offered in Slovakia, new innovative therapies only offered in the US, or stem cell infusion therapy. Animal-assisted therapies involving dolphins were high on the wish list (n = 10). Surgery outside Germany was requested only in three cases. Although the underlying conditions varied greatly, three conditions were frequently mentioned: disability (n = 10) with a comorbidity of epilepsy in half of the cases, cancer (n = 5) and brain damage (n = 3). Other disorders, diseases or conditions included cerebral palsy, paresis, genetic disorder, autism, prosthesis, orthopaedic intervention, accident, and mental disorder.

Funding need

Funding need was stated only in 197 out of 380 crowdfunding campaigns (51.84%). In the remaining cases (n = 183, 48.16%) campaign holders typically wrote that donors could give as much as they want. Table 6 shows the descriptive statistics of funding needs, while Fig. 1 plots the histogram of funding needs for campaigns with a target sum. The mean funding need was €14,166 after excluding two outliers with a target sum of €1 and €6 million. (The former campaign aimed to ease the life of patients with hyperhidrosis and bromhidrosis through surgery, innovative medical intervention and financial support, while the latter asked for donations for a researcher without any publications on Google Scholar.) Campaigns with lower funding needs were more popular; the funding need was €6000 or lower in more than half of cases (102 out of 198). Nevertheless, there were a few campaigns with large funding needs: 18 campaigns aimed at collecting more than €30,000.

Funding needs were the highest, on average, in the category of elderly and dementia (€40,208, n = 12), followed by transplants (€35,840, n = 5), cancer (€18,859, n = 40), sclerosis (€16,350, n = 6), and lipoedema (€15,317, n = 15). For the 14 most frequent conditions the full list is shown in Table 7, ordered by average funding need in decreasing order.