Nobody wrote that they are “perfectly excluded.” They do not have a bearing on the disposition of ED patients. Much more likely to affect your care is the way you treat the ED staff. Occasionally a VIP will come in and administrators will ask for special treatment, but this is usually accomplished by making them feel special. It is not accomplished by kicking some uninsured sick person out on the street.

You comment that the medical blogs prove otherwise is contradicted by all of the comments from the medical bloggers posted before your comment. Perhaps you read something between the lines, that is not written between the lines.

Conspiracy theories are the way uninformed people deal with uncertainty.

This is flatly false. Granting that a patients status or pocketbook or insurance coverage may not always affect every patient, nor will every treating physician consider status or money, money and status are not perfectly excluded and it is laughable to argue that this is the general case.

One need only look as far as behind-the-scenes medical blogs, and Medical news and opinion gathering blogs such as KevinMD to find distressing evidence on a daily basis that money and statue affect patient care, as they affect treatment in almost every other walk of life.

Nice post.

2) I’ve made famous/prominent people wait in the lobby.

3) Avoiding ambulance divert is a major goal for everyone dealing with numbers and finance because if the ER is full, we divert ambulances and lose something like $10,000/hour on average. No one would in administration would be stupid enough to devise policies to intentionally cause an ambulance divert situation if nothing else.

As I have pointed out many times, a good deal of BS appears in the “news” media relating to health care. Few articles, however, reach the level of irresponsibility achieved yesterday in Slate….