Is there a dark side to medical crowdfunding?

Over the last few years, a growing number of people have been turning to medical crowdfunding in a desperate attempt to cover their hospital bills. In response, many Indians have generously opened their wallets for strangers. But what if there are questions about the veracity of some of the fundraising campaigns on these platforms?
It all started with a paediatric cardiac surgeon’s tweet implying lack of oversight as he pointed out that in many cases the fundraising for a procedure was for an amount way more than it would cost even in a top corporate hospital.
TOI looked into some specific cases raised in the tweet, talking to the fundraising platforms and the hospital concerned to find them pointing fingers at each other. After several rounds of back and forth, here’s what we found.
The cases we looked into were of paediatric cardiac diseases treated through the fundraising platforms at Indraprastha Apollo hospital in Delhi. We sent details of four of these to Apollo, which started off by claiming that all the letters used as supporting documents for the fundraising were “completely false” and that the hospital “has no connection with these letters”.
All the letters in question were supposedly issued by the same paediatric cardiac surgeon. In most, the estimates given as cost of procedure were hugely inflated compared to charges in other corporate hospitals, according to Dr Prashant Mishra, a senior paediatric surgeon in Mumbai, and the man who had first drawn attention to the problems with the fundraising campaigns.
Referring to the letter purportedly issued by Apollo hospital (which it now denies having issued) and uploaded as a supporting document for a fundraiser in which the estimated cost was approximately Rs 12 lakh for open heart surgery to correct ventricular septal defect (VSD), Dr Mishra pointed out that even in a corporate hospital, it would not cost more than Rs 2. 5 lakh and that it could even be done for free in several charitable hospitals.
The spokesperson for the hospital first said that the doctor had denied issuing the letters and the hospital had checked its records and found no such patients. Since three of the letters were from Milaap fundraisers and one for a Ketto campaign, and since all of them were fundraisers marked as “verified” by the platforms, TOI reached out to the platforms for a reaction.
Milaap got back with details of payments transferred to Apollo and the steps it had taken to verify the fundraiser. However, the hospital continues to maintain that it “has nothing to do with these letters”.