Nora Kenworthy, "Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare" (MIT Press, 2024)

Oct 30, 2025

Nora Kenworthy, a Professor at the University of Washington, dives deep into the complexities of healthcare crowdfunding in her new book. She reveals how platforms like GoFundMe are reshaping access to medical care and exposing societal inequalities. Kenworthy discusses the narratives of deservingness that impact fundraising success and critiques the notion that crowdfunding democratizes charity. She also highlights emotional and social benefits of these campaigns while suggesting that they reflect broader systemic issues within healthcare.

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INSIGHT

Platforms Mirror Healthcare's Inequalities

Crowdfunding's logic mirrors neoliberal and racialized structures already shaping U.S. healthcare access.
Platforms ask us to convert systemic failures into marketable individual stories for donors to choose between.

ANECDOTE

Trevor: Too 'Undeserving' To Ask

Trevor, a single dad with diabetes, studied campaigns then hid from his network because he felt 'not deserving enough.'
He launched a campaign but didn't share it and unsurprisingly raised no money.

ANECDOTE

Withholding Facts To Win Sympathy

Hannah started a campaign for Allison's son but omitted that the driver was Allison's husband to preserve perceived deservingness.
They deleted comments asking how the accident happened to protect the campaign's appeal.

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In Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare (MIT Press, 2024), Dr. Nora Kenworthy presents an eye-opening investigation into charitable crowdfunding for healthcare in the United States—and the consequences of allowing healthcare access to be decided by the digital crowd.

Over the past decade, charitable crowdfunding has exploded in popularity across the globe. Sites such as GoFundMe, which now boasts a “global community of over 100 million” users, have transformed the ways we seek and offer help. When faced with crises—especially medical ones—Americans are turning to online platforms that promise to connect them to the charity of the crowd. What does this new phenomenon reveal about the changing ways we seek and provide healthcare? In Crowded Out, Dr. Kenworthy examines how charitable crowdfunding so quickly overtook public life, where it is taking us, and who gets left behind by this new platformed economy.
Although crowdfunding has become ubiquitous in our lives, it is often misunderstood: rather than a friendly free market “powered by the kindness” of strangers, crowdfunding is powerfully reinforcing inequalities and changing the way Americans think about and access healthcare. Drawing on extensive research and rich storytelling, Crowded Out demonstrates how crowdfunding for health is fueled by—and further reinforces—financial and moral “toxicities” in market-based healthcare systems. It offers a unique and distressing look beneath the surface of some of the most popular charitable platforms and helps to foster thoughtful discussions of how we can better respond to healthcare crises both small and large.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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