Ashley Goodwin wondered if it would be better to let the virulent cancer that had invaded his body just go ahead and kill him.
Death, as hard as it was to contemplate for the family man, would be much less of a financial burden than the bills generated by fighting the nearly incurable cancer he was diagnosed with in May 2016. His daughter, Georgia, was set to start college at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and his son, Jacob, was in high school.
“I was looking at, am I going to live to see her graduate? Are we going to be able to afford college?” said Goodwin, who was diagnosed with dedifferentiated retroperitoneal liposarcoma, a soft-tissue cancer in his abdominal cavity. “I didn’t want to put my family in a financial position where they can’t survive. I have life insurance and all that good stuff; it’s kind of sick to look at it that way. It’s sad but you seriously start thinking that way: if I just go ahead and hurry up and die.”
Goodwin, a salesman with Consolidated Electrical Distribution in Springdale, and his wife have annual income of approximately $100,000 but still had to turn to the internet and his network of friends and acquaintances to help foot his unexpected medical bills to cover costs his wife’s family health insurance didn’t. Kelly Hale Syer, executive director of the Downtown Springdale Alliance, helped write up a GoFundMe campaign for Goodwin in hopes of raising $10,000.
GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms have become more popular in recent years as sources of funds for people’s medical bills. Approximately half of GoFundMe campaigns are created to provide for the medical expenses of the beneficiary.
The campaign was a success, raising more than $13,000. On paper, the amount seems minuscule because Goodwin’s medical bills and hospital stays total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars with no end in sight.
Goodwin used that money for travel expenses since his cancer was rare enough to require the expert oncology services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Goodwin, who has had two surgeries to remove cancerous masses, was scheduled to undergo another surgery late last week at Sloan Kettering. What the surgeons remove — and Goodwin fears they will need to remove part of his intestines — will determine how long he will remain in New York in recovery.
Crowdfunding Health
GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform founded in 2010, has helped people raise more than $3 billion since its founding. The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a trade publication based in Washington that covers nonprofit philanthropies, reported that GoFundMe campaigns raised more than $1 billion in a one-year stretch in 2015; only nine charities ranked by the Chronicle raised more private money.
The percentages of medical-related campaigns are similar for YouCaring, another crowdfunding platform that was formed in San Francisco in 2011. Earlier in 2017, YouCaring acquired GiveForward, a crowdfunding platform that benefited medical needs nearly 70 percent of the time.
“Whether it’s Obamacare of Trumpcare, the weight of health care costs on consumers will only increase,” YouCaring CEO Dan Saper told media company Bloomberg in June. “It will drive more people to try and figure out how to pay health care needs, and crowdfunding is in its early days as a way to help those people.”
Platforms such as GoFundMe and YouCaring allow people to donate online to a fund to benefit a specific person or project. GoFundMe charges 5 percent of donations plus a 2.9 percent fee to process the payment, while YouCaring charges only the payment processing fee.
Crowdfunding has become more widespread. Startup businesses use platforms to raise capital, and students use them to raise money for school supplies, scholarship funds or travel expenses.
“It’s pretty darn prevalent,” said Heather Joslyn, assistant managing editor of the Chronicle, who noted that GoFundMe campaigns tend to benefit individuals.
Crowdfunding “has been growing pretty quickly; it definitely started sort of on the margins. Crowdfunding seems best suited to specific projects,” she said.
Joslyn said crowdfunding campaigns seem to work better when potential donors feel a sense of urgency in the giving. The Pew Research Center, in a 2016 report, found that 22 percent of people have donated to a crowdfunding campaign, more than had participated in a ride-sharing platform such as Uber or a home-sharing platform such as Airbnb.
The Pew research also showed that a majority of donors — 87 percent — participated in five or fewer campaigns, and 62 percent donated $50 or less. Sixty-eight percent of the donations were done in order to help a specific person or project.
Personal Project
Goodwin, 49, said starting a crowdfunding campaign was a hard decision to make because he grew up when a person’s financial situation was not something that was shared publicly. But he said he was shocked at how cancer had upended his “solid middle-class” comfort.
“All of a sudden, 20 percent of your income is going to something you didn’t plan on,” Goodwin said. “It affects things. I’m a salesman; I need to be in front of my customers to get my job done. That’s hard to do when you have a [chemotherapy] needle in my arm.
“It’s very humbling. Just to ask is humbling. I make decent money and I had to go to GoFundMe.”
Goodwin said it’s not so much the medical bills because, through his wife Dawn’s job at Nestle USA in Rogers, the family has very good health insurance. That pays for the $20,000 monthly chemotherapy, which has proved to be ineffective against his cancer, and the regular and expensive CT scans and MRIs to keep track of his cancer’s growth.
“I was going to live to be 90 and all that good stuff,” Goodwin said. “All of a sudden, boom, your world has changed. It’s a massive worry. That’s the big fear for me. My daughter mentioned one time about going to the doctor and not wanting to spend the money.
“It’s a little humbling when your kids are acting like that. That is some of the thoughts that I know have gone through their minds.”
Goodwin has already lost a kidney to the disease and said the five-year survival rate for his cancer is approximately one in four. The odds do not improve after that because liposarcoma keeps coming back and, Goodwin said, it will invade an organ he can’t live without.
“It’ll kill me, eventually,” Goodwin said. “I can’t leave my family destitute. At what point do you decide to no longer have treatment? It’s a quality of life issue and an economics issue.”