Go Fund Yourself
TWO DAYS AFTER receiving a diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer, Marisa Rahdar had to figure out how to beg for her life. “I didn’t want to do it at all,” she recalls. Rahdar is a 32-year-old bartender from Detroit, and she has insurance. Her brother, Dante, the one in the family who’s good with numbers, worked out the amount she’d need to cover her out-of-pocket medical expenses and take a break from serving beer so she could rest up after chemotherapy. The number he came up with was $25,000. Next came the pitch. That job fell to Dante, too. He chose YouCaring.com, rather than another crowdfunding site, because he’d recently seen a campaign posted on GoFundMe.com by a guy trying to raise money for potato salad; he didn’t want to post his sister’s suffering beside practical jokes. The pitch was brief:
My sister, Marisa Rahdar, was diagnosed with breast cancer on March 16th of 2017. Through the testing phase she has also been diagnosed with cancer located in her lymph nodes and tailbone. This upcoming week she will begin radiation and meet with her team of doctors at Troy Beaumont to finalize a plan of action for her treatment. In the meantime, we have estimated her medical expenses not covered by her insurance, as well as her living expenses during the time of her treatment. We will update this site during her treatment so you can all get a small sample of that famous Marisa “charm.” For those concerned, her eyebrows remain unsullied.
By now, almost everybody has seen pleas for help covering urgent medical bills in their Facebook feeds. With health care costs and high-deductible plans on the rise for more than a decade, medical expenses are the largest single cause of bankruptcies nationwide. Despite Obamacare’s efforts to rein in costs, the average deductible on a typical plan under the Affordable Care Act is $2,550—nearly as much as the entire monthly take-home pay of the average American worker. President Donald Trump’s efforts to destabilize Obamacare have already raised premiums, and experts predict the cost of a deductible under some versions of Republican health care legislation would rise to an average of at least $4,100. Meanwhile, according to the Federal Reserve, 44 percent of Americans in 2016 didn’t have so much as $400 saved up in the event of an
