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Comment by chaseadam17 | Hacker News Reader

These are great points. We would love to enable recurring donations. For example, you could allocate X% of your income every month to "Watsi Credit." We also think that a program like this would be great for Corporate Social Responsibility Programs.

Members of our team work for Kiva and Vittana (and I worked in microfinance for 4 years) and we would love to eventually try and offer a healthcare loan product (or at least encourage patients to open savings accounts). That said, there are lots of things that make this a tough market (e.g. people don't plan to get sick like they plan to start a business, cost of treatment can be more than they could ever repay, etc.). In all honesty, we can't even figure out healthcare in the US, and it's twice as hard in countries like Ethiopia.

Thanks for the feedback. We love it!

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Devil's advocate to myself: I heard Jessica Jackley speak once and one of the stories she told that stuck was about the that company offered to automate thousands of dollars to Kiva to go towards microloans. She refused because she wanted people to have a personal connection with borrowers.

I would love to say that if you took X% off my paycheck, I would sign up instantly. But I would just be escaping my responsibility as a citizen then.

It's a tricky situation because I want automation for cash flow, but at the same time I want intimacy with the program and the people it involves.

Exactly. I think that's where the "Watsi Credit" idea comes in. You could allocate $X per month, then head over to Watsi and spend your credit whenever you like. The donation is automated, but you still get to choose who you support.

Does that sound like something you would be interested in?

Yes please. And maybe credits that are not allocated within N days automatically get directed to a profile that Watsi chooses.

That's a great idea. Perhaps you could select from three options: 1)Receive an update every time you have new credit and allocate it yourself 2)If you don't allocate within X days the credit is automatically allocated to a patient OR 3)Automatically allocate all credit to patients' based on X criteria (location, age, etc.).

We'd love to implement this!

I second the concerns raised by alexanderh. Perhaps directing unallocated funds strictly on a needs basis would go some way towards addressing such concerns?

Such a scheme would also address the question of whether a patient should be expected to sacrifice their privacy in order to obtain funding.

I'd like this very much, but I'd also like to have it made as easy as possible to spend the credit. I made some quick suggestions in another reply, but I'd like to get an email (or App notification, or something) that prompted me to select from a handful of candidates that were selected in some way (where "some way" can be a lot of different things.

I appreciate that people want to have a connection to the people they fund, and I'd like to have that as well, but I don't necessary need it before I commit to funding--I just want to be able to follow up later on.

You can just send a weekly email with three suggestions and clicking on one of them opens a web page which will select that cause.

Why would an automatic X% donation be "escaping [your] responsibility as a citizen"?

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