Relying on crowdfunding to pay health bills? It's more common than you might think.

Starting a crowdfunding campaign to help cover medical expenses might seem like a rare and extraordinary circumstance. But a new survey shows that it's actually a lot more common than you might think.

Researchers from NORC at the University of Chicago recently conducted a survey to learn about the prevalence of crowdfunding health campaigns. It turns out that a large swath of the American public — approximately 50 million, or 20 percent of Americans — have contributed to these sorts of campaigns.

What's more, eight million Americans have started a campaign to help pay for medical expenses for themselves or someone in their household, while 12 million had started a campaign for someone else. According to the researchers' survey, that's three percent and five percent, respectively.

The analysis comes from a nationally representative sample of 1,020 American adults. NORC conducted the survey in November 2019.

The survey's findings speak to the charitable goodness that online, crowdsourced giving enables. But pledging money to help pay someone's medical bills on a crowdfunding site is actually the feel-good underbelly of a depressing reality: that millions of people have neither the cash nor the insurance to pay for healthcare.

“As annual out-of-pocket costs continue to rise, more Americans are struggling to pay their medical bills, and millions are turning to their social networks and crowdfunding sites to fund medical treatments and pay medical bills,” Mollie Hertel, a senior research scientist at NORC behind the survey, said in a statement.

Despite gains in insurance coverage in the mid-2010s after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the amount of uninsured people rose in 2018 to 28 million. The number of people who are "underinsured" — meaning they have insurance, but deductibles and other costs still comprise more than 5-10 percent of their income — has also ballooned to 44 million. Medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, and 137 million Americans are struggling with medical debt.

No wonder we're literally pleading for our lives online.

GoFundMe is one of the leading destination for medical-based giving campaigns. It doesn't shy away from the realities that the campaigns on their website reflect about the state of healthcare in America.

"While GoFundMe can provide timely, critical help to people facing health care crises, we do not aim to be a substitute social safety net," GoFundMe told Mashable. "A crowdfunding platform can not and should not be a solution to complex, systemic problems that must be solved with meaningful public policy. We believe that affordable access to comprehensive health care is a right, and action must be taken at the local, state, and federal levels of government to make this a reality for all Americans. But in the meantime, we will continue to work hard to provide a place where Americans can help one another during times of need."

The NORC study also sought to learn about why and to whom we're giving in these campaigns. While 46 percent of respondents said they gave to a friend, the next largest demographic — even above family — was to a stranger, at 35 percent.

"I don’t think I expected that number to be quite so high," Hertel told Mashable.

Even as people give online themselves, they think the government should be more responsible for covering medical costs: two thirds of Americans reported that the government should bear "a great deal" of responsibility "for providing help when medical care is unaffordable." Only a third think the same applies to family and friends.

"This study is really the first time that we’ve asked Americans about the prevalence of crowdfunding, who they are donating to, and even who is responsible for paying for that care," Hertel said. "We are hoping that this will be just the beginning of further research into crowdfunding so we can really dig into what these campaigns are funding, average donations, and more."

Healthcare is already exerting a huge force in American politics; according to a recent Gallup poll, it's the issue the most voters rate as "extremely important." The prevalence of crowdfunded healthcare throws the reason for that urgency into sharp relief.