Is Most Dutch Medical Crowdfunding Really for Surgery Abroad? What the Data Shows

The Netherlands has one of the most complete health insurance systems in Europe. Coverage is mandatory by law, insurers cannot turn anyone down or charge them more for being sick, and government data puts effective enrollment at essentially the entire population.¹ By the usual measure of "does everyone have insurance," the Dutch system is about as close to solved as universal healthcare gets.

So it's a strange thing to read that Dutch crowdfunding platforms have spent the past several years watching medical campaigns climb — and that a growing share of that money isn't paying Dutch hospital bills at all. It's buying plane tickets, hotel rooms, and operations in Spain, Mexico, Utah, and Florida.² If the system already covers everyone, what exactly are people raising money for?

What was actually reported

The claim that kicked off this story is straightforward on its face: RTL Nieuws spoke with GoFundMe and WhyDonate — the two largest crowdfunding platforms operating in the Netherlands — and both described a "notable rise" in medical campaigns over the past five years, typically involving seriously ill people raising money for treatment or surgery outside the country.² NL Times' write-up carried the headline "Mostly for surgeries abroad."

Read past the headline, though, and the reporting doesn't actually attach a number to "mostly." Neither platform disclosed what share of their medical campaigns are for care abroad specifically, as opposed to domestic costs like home adaptations, mobility equipment, or lost income during illness.² That's a real gap: the trend — more medical crowdfunding, more of it aimed abroad — is corroborated by several years of Dutch reporting, but the specific "majority" framing in the headline is not something any source, including the original one, quantifies.

What is better documented is the shape of the growth. A Dutch crowdfunding-data tracker citing researcher Ronald Kleverlaan's work shows medical campaigns rising from roughly 85 projects in 2015 to about 270 in 2018, with roughly €4 million raised for medical purposes that year.³ More than 10,000 crowdfunding projects of all kinds now launch in the Netherlands annually.⁴ Five platforms actively handle medical fundraising in the country: GoFundMe, Geef.nl, WhyDonate, Steunactie, and Doneeractie.nl.⁵ None of them audit whether a treatment being funded is medically sound before a campaign goes live.⁶

Netherlands vs. United States: two very different reasons to crowdfund

Medical crowdfunding is not a uniquely Dutch phenomenon — it's actually far larger in the United States. But the reason people turn to it is close to opposite, which is what makes the Dutch case worth examining on its own terms rather than assuming it's the same story with a different flag.

That last row is the most interesting point of agreement. Two independent countries, two different underlying causes, and yet a very similar failure rate: crowdfunding a serious illness rarely fully works, whether you're doing it because your coverage has a gap or because you have no coverage at all.

Why a universal system still has this gap

The mechanism is spelled out plainly by Zorginstituut Nederland, the Dutch National Health Care Institute that administers the basic insurance package (basispakket). Care abroad is only reimbursed if the identical care would also be insured inside the Netherlands — full stop.⁹ On top of that, a treatment has to meet three tests to count as insured at all: it must reflect "the state of science and practice" (stand van de wetenschap en praktijk), be delivered "as the profession customarily provides it," and the patient must reasonably need that specific form of care.⁹ The rule doesn't distinguish between a clinic in Rotterdam and one in Barcelona — it looks at the treatment itself.

That single rule explains most of what's being crowdfunded. If a therapy is still experimental, hasn't been approved for a given condition, or simply isn't standard Dutch medical practice, insurance won't pay for it whether the patient stays home or flies to another country. The "universal coverage" the Netherlands is known for guarantees access to a defined, evidence-based basic package — not to whatever a desperate patient and their doctor abroad have agreed to try.

There is a narrow European exception: if an internationally recognized treatment genuinely isn't available in the Netherlands, EU cross-border care rules can require reimbursement.⁴ But that exception is for treatments that are themselves recognized and evidence-based — not for the unproven or experimental procedures that make up a large share of the crowdfunded cases identified by Dutch reporters and medical watchdogs.^{10 6}

The wait-time half of the story

Coverage gaps aren't the only driver. The Dutch healthcare system also has a documented, worsening waiting-time problem, tracked by the Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa) against the country's own "Treek norm" — a four-week maximum for most outpatient treatment.

• Just over half of Dutch outpatient clinics now exceed that four-week standard. The national average wait rose from 34 days in 2022 to 42 days in 2025.¹¹ At Diabeter's diabetes clinics specifically, the average wait went from roughly three months in 2022 to about 7.5 months in 2025 — the fastest-rising wait NZa data identified.¹¹
• Specialist waits vary enormously by hospital and region: NZa figures cited by NL Times show a 30-day wait for gastroenterology at Maastricht UMC versus 360 days at Zuyderland Hospital, and ophthalmology waits exceeding two years at hospitals in Zwolle, Kampen, and Meppel.¹² About 194,000 Dutch residents currently have no registered GP at all.¹²
• Mental health care is worse still: the average wait for treatment reached 24 weeks in 2025 — three weeks longer than 2024 and well past the 14-week national maximum — with more than 100,000 people on waiting lists.¹³
• Separately, the Netherlands' access to newly approved medicines has been slipping: only 41% of recently approved oncology drugs were available to Dutch patients in 2025, down from 80% in 2022 and below the EU average of 51%, while neighboring Germany made 91% of the same drugs available.⁴

None of this is a story about people being denied care outright. It's a story about a system that is, by international standards, comprehensive but increasingly slow and narrow at the edges — and both of those pressures, coverage rules and clogged waiting lists, point people toward the same workaround: pay for it yourself, somewhere else, and ask the internet to help foot the bill.

What people are actually crowdfunding for

The Dutch Association Against Quackery (Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij), a watchdog group that has tracked this space for years, has compiled some of the more specific examples behind the trend.¹⁰ The patients involved are disproportionately young women with hard-to-diagnose chronic conditions — long COVID, gastroparesis, persistent post-concussion symptoms, and connective-tissue disorders — who say Dutch specialists could not resolve their symptoms.^{10 14}

Several destinations recur by name:

• Málaga, Spain — Hospital Quirónsalud, where vascular surgeon Alejandro Rodríguez Morata reportedly sees around two Dutch patients a week for abdominal surgery targeting vascular compression syndromes, at a cost the watchdog group put at roughly €10,000 to over €100,000 depending on the procedure.¹⁰
• Barcelona, Spain — neurosurgeon Vicenç Gilete performs cervical spine fixation with metal plates and screws for patients diagnosed with craniocervical instability, a procedure Dutch professional associations in gastroenterology, pediatrics, and vascular surgery have publicly warned lacks strong scientific support.^{10 14}
• Provo, Utah — Cognitive FX, a clinic offering an fMRI-guided, two-week intensive rehabilitation program, which the watchdog group says has treated "many hundreds" of Dutch patients, at a reported cost of roughly €15,000 to €25,000.¹⁰
• Orlando, Florida — AVID Clinics, an Israeli-founded hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) center with capacity for 14 simultaneous patients, also drawing Dutch clients seeking treatment for long-COVID and post-concussion symptoms.¹⁰

One of the earliest and most visible cases was Ilona Spee, then 38, who crowdfunded roughly €130,000 for cervical spine stabilization surgery in Barcelona for a diagnosed craniocervical instability — a descent of the cerebellum into the neck that Dutch specialists had not offered to operate on.¹⁵ Her case, first covered by RTL Nieuws in 2020, predates the current reporting wave by several years, which is itself a sign that this is a longer-running pattern than a single 2026 headline suggests, not a brand-new phenomenon.

The science isn't always settled, either

It would be a mistake to treat every crowdfunded treatment abroad as proven care that Dutch doctors are unfairly withholding. Some of it sits in a real scientific gray zone.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is the clearest example. A 2022 Israeli study reported measurable benefit for certain post-illness symptoms. Two more recent trials — a 2025 Belgian study and a 2025 Swedish study — found no effect beyond placebo for similar patient groups, and a 2025 Dutch pilot study observed possible benefits but could not establish that HBOT itself, rather than other factors, caused them.¹⁰ That's a genuine, ongoing scientific dispute, not a settled case of foreign clinics having the right answer that Dutch hospitals are refusing to adopt.

The Cognitive FX program's own website cites a 77% "return to normal function" rate among patients, but the original Dutch research behind that kind of claim has been reported as considerably more cautious about attributing the improvement specifically to the program rather than to time, other treatment, or natural recovery.¹⁰ Following a January 2026 Nieuwsuur broadcast on abdominal surgeries performed abroad for unexplained pain, Dutch professional associations for gastroenterology, pediatrics, and vascular surgery jointly warned that these procedures often lack scientific support, carry real risks including blood infections and tissue death, and are not automatically performed to a higher standard abroad than at home.¹⁴

There's also historical precedent for this pattern going badly. Dutch patients with Lyme disease previously crowdfunded heavily for stem-cell treatments in Serbia, Turkey, and Slovenia; that wave largely ended after researchers — including stem-cell scientist Hans Clevers — and the Nijmegen "PLEASE" study found no evidence the treatments worked.¹⁰

What the headline numbers leave out

A few things are easy to miss if you only read the initial coverage:

• The "mostly" claim is unaudited. It comes from two commercial platforms describing their own campaign mix, filtered through a single news report, with no published breakdown by campaign type or destination.²
• Most medical crowdfunding fails anyway. Fewer than one in ten Dutch crowdfunding campaigns of any kind hits its target, and roughly half raise only partial funding.³ A parallel, independently conducted study of the much larger US market found a nearly identical 9.2% success rate.⁸ Raising the money is the exception, not the rule, on both sides of the Atlantic.
• Nobody is checking the medicine. Dutch platforms use AI systems and staff review primarily to catch fraud and outright misinformation, not to evaluate whether a funded treatment is medically sound — WhyDonate's founder has said directly that it's not a platform's place to judge whether a treatment is "sensible" for an individual patient.^{2 5} Health insurer group Zorgverzekeraars Nederland has echoed physicians' concerns about this gap but stopped short of calling for platforms to be regulated.^{5 6}
• A 2022 government ethics recommendation has gone nowhere. The Centre for Ethics and Health (CEG) formally recommended improved oversight of medical crowdfunding roughly four years before the current health minister said, in mid-2026, that coalition politics prevented committing to act.⁵
• Some of what's crowdfunded is going toward genuinely disputed science, not simply care that's proven abroad and denied at home — which matters for anyone deciding whether a given campaign deserves support.¹⁰
• Medical ethicists have flagged the human cost of that gap directly. "People pin their last hopes on those treatments and raise a lot of money for them, but sometimes they end up getting even sicker," Hafez Ismaili M'hamdi, vice-chair of the government's Centre for Ethics and Health, has warned — arguing platforms and, ultimately, government should do more to help donors and patients tell hope from false hope.¹⁶

How to actually use these numbers

If you're the one considering crowdfunding for treatment abroad, or deciding whether to donate to someone else's campaign, the useful questions aren't "is the Netherlands failing patients?" or "is this doctor abroad legitimate?" in the abstract. They're narrower and more answerable:

1. Ask why, specifically, Dutch insurance won't cover it — because it's experimental, because it isn't "customary care" for the diagnosis, or because of a wait list. Each has a different implication for how confident you should be in the treatment itself.
2. Ask what independent evidence exists beyond the clinic's own website, the way the HBOT and Cognitive FX examples above show can diverge sharply from marketing claims.
3. Ask how the campaign's total, if reached, compares to the full cost — travel, accommodation, follow-up care back in the Netherlands if something goes wrong, and the fact that most campaigns don't reach 100% of their goal even when donors are generous.
4. Treat "coverage is universal" and "care is guaranteed" as two different claims. The Dutch case shows they can both be true and still leave a real gap between them — which is exactly the gap crowdfunding has moved in to fill.

Footnotes

1. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/international-health-policy-center/countries/netherlands — The Commonwealth Fund, "Netherlands," International Health Care System Profiles. Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩²

2. https://nltimes.nl/2026/03/23/medical-crowdfunding-netherlands-mostly-surgeries-abroad — NL Times, "More medical crowdfunding in Netherlands; Mostly for surgeries abroad," citing RTL Nieuws reporting (published Mar 23, 2026). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. https://www.crowdfundingcijfers.nl/crowdfunding-voor-medische-behandelingen/ — Crowdfunding Cijfers, "Crowdfunding voor medische behandelingen," citing research by crowdfunding analyst Ronald Kleverlaan. Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. https://www.zorgvisie.nl/trage-toegang-tot-innovatie-zet-nederlandse-patient-op-achterstand/ — Zorgvisie, "Trage toegang tot innovatie zet Nederlandse patiënt op achterstand," citing RTL Nieuws and Dutch medicine-access data (published 2026). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. https://nltimes.nl/2026/07/20/insurers-warn-unproven-medical-treatments-dutch-crowdfunding-platforms — NL Times, "Insurers warn of unproven medical treatments on Dutch crowdfunding platforms," quoting Cas Ceulen (VGZ board member) and citing Zorgverzekeraars Nederland and the Centre for Ethics and Health (CEG) (published Jul 20, 2026). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. https://nieuws.zorgportaal.nl/anders/10286-begrip-bij-zorgverzekeraars-bezorgdheid-artsen-medische-crowdfunding — Zorgportaal, "Begrip bij zorgverzekeraars bezorgdheid artsen medische crowdfunding," citing a De Volkskrant investigation and Zorgverzekeraars Nederland (published Jun 11, 2019). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/health-care-costs-crowdfunding-medical-bills/ — CBS News, "As medical costs soar, more Americans turn to crowdfunding," citing survey research by NORC at the University of Chicago (published Feb 21, 2020). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩²

8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7058302/ — PLoS One (via PubMed Central), peer-reviewed study of social inequities in US medical crowdfunding campaigns (published Mar 5, 2020). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩²

9. https://www.zorginstituutnederland.nl/verzekerde-zorg/b/buitenland-en-zorg-zvw — Zorginstituut Nederland (Dutch National Health Care Institute), "Buitenland en zorg (Zvw)." Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩²

10. https://www.kwakzalverij.nl/nieuws/crowdfunding-voor-peperdure-buitenlandse-kwakbehandelingen/ — Vereniging tegen de Kwakzalverij (Dutch Association Against Quackery), "Crowdfunding voor peperdure buitenlandse kwakbehandelingen," reporting on named clinics, costs, and clinical studies. Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

11. https://nltimes.nl/2026/03/02/half-dutch-patient-clinics-long-waiting-lists — NL Times, "Over half of Dutch out-patient clinics have long waiting lists," citing Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa) data analyzed by ANP (published Mar 2, 2026). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩²

12. https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-news/dutch-healthcare-patients-wait-year-or-more-specialist-appointments — IamExpat, "Dutch healthcare patients wait a year or more for specialist appointments," by Simone Jacobs, citing Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa) data (published Jun 8, 2026). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩²

13. https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-news/dutch-residents-wait-2-years-mental-health-care — IamExpat, "Dutch residents wait up to 2 years for mental health care," citing the "Insight into Healthcare Providers" dashboard and analysis by MIND and Radar. Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩

14. https://nltimes.nl/2026/01/28/dutch-women-unexplained-abdominal-pain-seek-surgeries-abroad-amid-diagnostic-gaps — NL Times, "Dutch women with unexplained abdominal pain seek surgeries abroad amid diagnostic gaps," citing a joint NOS Stories/Nieuwsuur investigation (published Jan 28, 2026). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

15. https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5193834/ilona-hersenverzakking-dromen-zienhuis-crowdfunding-behandeling — RTL Nieuws, profile of Ilona Spee's craniocervical instability surgery and crowdfunding campaign (published Oct 2020). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩ ↩²

16. https://nos.nl/artikel/2424737-medisch-ethici-pas-op-met-crowdfunding-voor-behandelingen-in-buitenland — NOS, "Medisch ethici: pas op met crowdfunding voor behandelingen in buitenland," quoting Hafez Ismaili M'hamdi (Erasmus MC medical ethicist) and citing the Centre for Ethics and Health (CEG). Accessed Sep 9, 2026. ↩

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