The Absence of a State Backstop Is Precisely Where Online Mutual Aid’s “Unique Value” Lies

When people discuss online mutual aid, one question comes up again and again: without a state backstop and without an insurer’s rigid promise to pay, does this kind of protection still have meaning?

I believe it not only has meaning — precisely because there is no backstop, it can become a unique tier within the social security system.

Any “backstop” has a cost.

When an insurer promises to pay if an agreed risk occurs in the future, it must hold capital, risk reserves and reinsurance for that promise, along with the corresponding operating and regulatory costs. Those costs ultimately show up in the product’s price. We cannot demand one hundred percent certain, rigid protection while at the same time hoping that such protection is infinitely cheap.

Online mutual aid takes a different road.

It does not accumulate a large sum in advance to cover every future risk; it relies on a mutual-aid community that keeps existing: when someone suffers a serious illness or other hardship, everyone shares the burden. As long as the community can maintain sufficient scale, its rules are fair and transparent, and participants are willing to keep staying, the group itself can keep generating fresh capacity for mutual aid.

Such protection is of course not unlimited, and it should not be packaged as an absolutely certain promise.

But not being one hundred percent certain does not mean it has no value.

Suppose an ordinary family cannot for the moment afford to set aside more money each year to buy adequate commercial insurance. Then joining a well-run mutual-aid community at a lower cost and gaining a basic layer of risk-sharing is still more meaningful than having no supplementary protection at all.

More importantly, this can form a natural gradient of protection:

Public health insurance solves the most basic problems, online mutual aid provides low-cost supplementary protection, and commercial insurance provides more certain and higher-level protection.

When a person’s finances are limited, they can start with low-cost mutual aid; as income rises, family responsibilities grow and risk awareness deepens, they will naturally seek more certain protection and buy commercial insurance.

So online mutual aid and commercial insurance are not necessarily substitutes; they can be a progression.

From this angle, “no state backstop” may not even be a defect that online mutual aid must fix; it can be part of its institutional position.

The state does not need to bear ultimate payment responsibility for every act of social mutual assistance, nor to convert every grassroots risk-sharing mechanism into insurance. What truly matters is whether the rules are open, the funds transparent, the risks fully disclosed, and whether participants clearly understand what it is they are getting.

As long as “mutual aid” is not advertised as “insurance,” as long as uncertain mutual-aid capacity is not packaged as a rigid payment promise, and as long as participants choose for themselves with full information, society can perfectly well allow protection methods of different degrees of certainty and different cost levels to exist side by side.

A mature social security system should never have only one kind of protection.

Some people need the basic protection provided by the state; some are willing to take part in low-cost social mutual aid; some need the certainty of commercial insurance; and some can afford higher-level protection.

Each performs a different function, and together they form a multi-tiered system running from low-cost, basic risk-sharing to high-certainty, high-level protection.

The question truly worth discussing about online mutual aid should not be only:

“Who will provide the backstop?”

Another question should also be asked:

“If participants know that no one is providing a backstop, yet still believe such mutual aid is worth joining, why can we not leave a place for this kind of social self-help?”

When members of society are willing to organize voluntarily and share one another’s burdens when hardship strikes, that is itself a force for social protection.

It does not necessarily need to become insurance, nor does the state necessarily need to backstop the outcome.

Being able to organize ordinary people to help one another over the long term, transparently and fairly, is itself the value of its existence.