Americans Are Turning to TikTok to Pay Their Medical Bills
“WATCH FOR 5 SECONDS TO PAY OFF HIS MEDICAL BILLS,” the text over Alexis Pruitt’s TikTok video reads. Speaking straight to the camera, Pruitt says she and her young kids are going to have a dance party and they hope you’ll stay and watch. The video cuts to Pruitt’s children, Elijah and Naomi, dancing and laughing. It’s been viewed 6.3 million times and Pruitt says she made about $2,500 from it, with which she was able to pay off several outstanding medical bills for 3-year-old Elijah.
The pressures of the American healthcare system have left some families reaching not for GoFundMe to fundraise for medical costs, but TikTok. Creators are turning to the app in hopes of hitting the viral lottery and being able to pay for their medical bills, imploring viewers to stay and watch their entire video and like and comment and share while they’re at it. Once a TikTok user has more than 10,000 followers and has a minimum of 100,000 views in the previous 30 days, they’re eligible for the Creator Rewards Program, which pays users for views on videos more than a minute long. For the viewers, giving has never been easier – instead of donating money, all you have to do is interact with a video. And for some creators, TikTok fundraising is changing their ability to afford their family’s medical bills.
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Pruitt, 30, found out she was pregnant with her son, Elijah, when her daughter was only 12 weeks old. It had taken her years to get pregnant with her daughter, and the news was a shock. Her pregnancy with Elijah was complicated, with Pruitt receiving regular blood transfusions and giving birth early, at 36 weeks. In his first year of life, Elijah, 3, was diagnosed with both reactive airway disease and Factor XII Deficiency, a rare genetic disorder that affects the body’s ability to clot blood. He’s been hospitalized five times so far and regularly sees a pulmonologist for his lung disorder, and a hematologist for his blood disorder.
The bills that come with Elijah’s medical needs are considerable: Once, Pruitt checked her doorbell camera to find a sheriff waiting. She rushed to the door, thinking something was wrong, only to find out the officer was there to serve her with papers for unpaid medical debt. “They were going to start taking it out of our paycheck if we didn’t pay our hospital bill,” she says. “I felt like a horrible mom for not taking care of the bills when they originally happened. When your son has blood in his brain, I’m not worried about how much this MRI is going to cost or how much this CT [scan] is going to cost. It’s not like you really get a choice.” Two months later, after posting the semi-viral ‘dance party’ video, Pruitt was able to pay the bill. Now, she posts regularly on TikTok asking people to interact with her videos for the express purpose of paying for medical care. Pruitt estimates this earns her $500 a month.
In recent polling from the KFF, a nonprofit organization that conducts research on health policy, half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford health care costs. Liz Hamel, Vice President and Director of Public Opinion and Survey Research at KFF, tells Rolling Stone that while the Affordable Care Act increased the number of people who have health insurance, costs have gone up. “Employers who are the source of health care coverage for most people have shifted more and more the burden of that cost onto people, and deductibles have gone up. So while we have far more people who have insurance, insurance covers less over time,” Hamel says. “When we ask people about their economic worries, unexpected medical bills are almost always at the top or near the top of the list.”
And the inability to pay medical bills can affect the continuity of care, like in Devin Gillette’s case. Gillette, a 34-year-old mother of five from Utah, once had to skip a month of at-home chemotherapy injections for a mixture of chronic auto-immune diseases, including lupus, after the copay was $2,500, even with insurance. “I was like, ‘Excuse me? I can’t do that at the drop of a hat,’” she says. “I 100 percent missed that month and went right back into a flare.” Each month, Gillette and her husband are left with between $600 to $800 of medical bills – which is where TikTok comes in.
Gillette had more than 10,000 followers from a one-off viral video in 2020, so she was pre-qualified both to enter the Creator Rewards Program and to sell things on TikTok Shop (which only requires a creator to have 5,000 followers). After she posted a TikTok Shop video in which she wondered how old was too old to wear a pair of fleece overalls, Gillette says she made around $500 in commission. “I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I could do this. Maybe this could work,’” she says. It’s not that she’s making a ton of money from TikTok, but every little bit helps — as a mom, she worries that the financial burdens of her chronic illnesses will have a negative impact on her kids’ lives. So when she makes extra cash from TikTok, “that doesn’t take away from our kids’ Christmas… so that’s the reason why I’m doing it.”
It’s an indictment of the American healthcare system (the U.S. has the distinction of being the only high-income country without universal healthcare) that Gillette and others experiencing medical hardship have to turn to TikTok to cover medical bills. In Gillette’s case, both she and her husband work full-time, but it’s still not enough. “It’s awful that in order for us to be okay and to feel healthy and to just survive and be there for our kids… you have to be wealthy, even with insurance,” she says. “I don’t know what I would do if me and my husband were not privileged enough to work and to have good jobs and to have insurance. It’s like, yes, we are struggling because of it, but I still have a roof on my head and food and clothes and my kids and a house.”
When Hannah McClintock, a 26-year-old mom from Texas, talks about her son Tucker’s life, her voice cracks, and she has to take a moment to collect herself. Tucker was born a few years after his older brother, Grayson, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. For a while, McClintock didn’t think she could bear having another child but she wanted her older daughter, Raegan, to have someone to grow up with. When Tucker was born, he went into respiratory failure and was put on a machine that McClintock says was so loud it sounded “like a jet engine.” At just a few days old, Tucker suffered a stroke, and now, at a year old, he’s been approved for a kidney transplant in December.
McClintock posts daily on TikTok, with a typical video asking people to “hang out” with her and Tucker in order to pay for his upcoming operation. Her most popular video has been viewed 4.7 million times, but it was posted before she hit the threshold of 10,000 followers, so she didn’t make money from it. McClintock only recently got approved for the Creator Rewards Program and hasn’t gotten a payout yet (though she’s received $68 from ‘gifts’ people send to her videos). In the bio of McClintock’s TikTok account is a link to a fundraiser for Tucker and she says viewers from TikTok have donated somewhere around $8,000.
“I hope that TikTok can help us in a way that we need, just like every other family,” McClintock says. ”I feel like every child deserves a chance, and it makes it hard when you put a price tag on your kid. You can’t.”
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