Lending for health or borrowing trouble?

Is trying to help children always a good thing?

While the rest of the world was watching the Michael Jackson memorial, this afternoon on Twitter an interesting discussion occurred between global health expert Alanna Shaikh and Tori Tuncan, founder of the microloan service Lend4Health.

Although Lend4Health is a celebrated example of an organization that is using online social networks to promote social good, Shaikh confessed that the venture "gives me the creeps." Part of the problem, Shaikh noted, is the medical approach that Lend4Health currently supports: the controversial biomedical approach to autism, "quackery" that should not be a basis for a family's going into debt.

Another problem is more systemic: namely, the way that the microlending model infringes on the privacy of children.

It's a real issue. Lend4Health's website offers photos, names and diagnoses of the kids being served by the loans, and its Twitter account provides updates and detailed appeals. Even if parents are legally free to disclose otherwise private medical information regarding a minor child, Lend4Health raises what is--for me at least--an ethically questionable incentive for parents to make a child's condition public in exchange for cash.

Whatever one's assessment of biomedical intervention, surely the social enterprise community is not so caught up in its own virtue that it can't see how posting "my son Timmy is autistic and we can't afford to pay to get rid of his condition" can hurt the very children that lending for health is supposed to protect. A child's sense of self, relation to parents, interaction with friends--publishing medical information can have payback for the kid years after the loan itself is repaid.

While I admire Lend4Health's dedication to doing good, I am concerned about the potential ramifications for both children and adults should the model go to scale.