A crowd-funding as a solution for patients swamped with medical bills

A young couple from Florida couldn't get their insurance company to pay for in-vitro fertilization procedure, so they turned to the Internet for help.

They used a crowd-funding website called Indiegogo and set up a campaign to raise $5,000. Online contributions of more than $8,000 ultimately rolled in from friends, family and strangers. And now they have a baby.

According to Slava Rubin, CEO of Indiegogo, based in San Francisco, that's the real power of a crowd in helping other people. Crowd-funding has grown along with the Internet as people increasingly band together to support charities, raise money for movies and other projects — and now seek money to pay medical bills.

Indiegogo, which launched in 2008 to help filmmakers raise money online, has seen such a marked uptick in personal fundraising to pay for medical costs that it recently started Indiegogo Life — for personal causes, including healthcare. There are a host of other medical crowd-funding sites such as GoFundMe and YouCaring — both of which also report huge increases in medical fundraising in the last two years.

Unlike more traditional methods, online campaigns allow fundraisers to reach people far beyond their immediate social network. "Here's a way to give to an individual — it might be someone you know or someone you've never met. You know what their need is and that your donation will go to meeting their exact need," says Leonard Lee, head of communications for YouCaring based in San Francisco.

Based on: latimes.com

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