- Many crowdfunding platforms undertake targeted advertising campaigns to raise money for the treatment of patients from disadvantaged families.
- Despite the obvious benefits, depicting people in desperate need goes against the tenet of equitable access to healthcare and raises ethical concerns.
- Medical crowdfunding can exacerbate health and social inequalities by amplifying the crowd’s preference – where cases are not determined based on need.
Numerous crowdfunding platforms across India carry out targeted advertising campaigns to raise money for the treatment of patients, especially children who are in dire need of urgent medical care, as their families are short on money.
Despite the obvious benefits, it merits asking if we are doing the right thing by showing patients to be weak, desperate and pleading in order to pique viewers’ interests, to elicit pity and possibly to advertise the platform’s value and utility. Doing so fundamentally goes against the tenet of equitable access to healthcare and thus raises ethical concerns.
The issue of crowdfunding for medical treatment came to the fore recently in the matter of Impact Guru Technology Ventures Pvt. Ltd. v. Special Inspector General of Police, Prevention of Crime Against Women and Children and Ors. It was filed by Impact Guru Technology Ventures, a crowdfunding platform, before the Bombay high court on October 3, 2022.
The company challenged a show-cause notice that the police had issued to it on September 7, 2022, under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000, for displaying children in a “wrong perspective” in its social media advertisements.
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