Winner – Financial Times: Click to donate
- Contributor – Barney Jopson
- Judges’ Comments – Barney Jopson’s “Click to donate” story was a refreshingly contrarian challenge to the conventional wisdom presented by the highly favorable press that crowdfunding has attracted. Dashed-off valentines to crowdfunding campaigns — so often about how they help needy patients cope with medical concerns — have become routine on nightly television news, internet sites and social media. As Jopson notes, these efforts do help patients deal with often-staggering medical costs, but he goes on to explain that they can also turn the patients into beggars, lead them to give up their privacy and set up popularity contests where the poor without strong networks fare less well than others. He reports that GoFundMe, the No. 1 site for crowdfunding, raised $5 billion since 2010. That’s a drop in the bucket versus the cost of health care in America or the need for better health care for many Americans. He links moving individual stories of these Americans to national and international public health care policies. In the end, Jopson concludes that the successes of crowdfunding medical help-campaigns, which include high-minded claims that they are properly disrupting traditional philanthropy, distract us from getting serious about reforming our pricey, inefficient and inadequate health care system.
