What scares me is someone who thinks a lot about solidarity and political power and like how we shift the needle is that I think we're losing some of the opportunities for more political organizing every time we turn to this as our kind of reaction to crisis. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Nora Kenworthy.

Nora is the author of Crowded Out, the true cost of crowdfunding health care, and is an associate

professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies at the University of Washington, Bothel.

I'm sure by now you have run into GoFundMe campaigns for any number of things, but one of the very

common uses, of course, is for health care,

in particular in the United States, where there is the private health care system, and that can

be very costly for a lot of people, whether they have insurance or don't, and that frequently

leads to people turning to crowdfunding for support, especially when they have really shock,

accidents, or diagnosis with severe illnesses.

But what is actually the consequence of having this relying on crowdfunding instead of trying

to deal with more structural issues? And does that actually distract us from the possibility of

solving these problems in other ways by focusing on this individual means

of addressing the issue instead of thinking more structurally and about bigger fixes.

Does that actually move the energy away from those structural fixes?

Because, you know, it seems like we're kind of alleviating parts of this problem in the short

term through these digital platforms.

I think that is a serious concern. And of course,

Nora and I discuss it in this interview, and Nora also gets into it in her great book. Because the truth of things is that these crowdfunding campaigns are very inequitable. They do not solve the real

problem. And the people who often benefit from them are often not the people

who are most in need and are most suffering. In her research, Nora found that 90% of campaigns

for medical expenses don't meet their goal and that the medium medical campaign raises

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