NYU is not the only hospital that prioritizes VIPs. Columbia Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan Kettering have entire VIP wings. I suspect all the major hospitals do. Call it fund raising.

The hospital spokesperson, Ms. Greiner, embodies the worst of corporate doublespeak. I can't stand people like her.

By Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

In New York University’s busy Manhattan emergency department, Room 20 is special.

Steps away from the hospital’s ambulance bay, the room is outfitted with equipment to perform critical procedures or isolate those with highly infectious diseases.

Doctors say Room 20 is usually reserved for two types of patients: Those whose lives are on the line. And those who are V.I.P.s.

In September 2021, doctors were alerted that Kenneth G. Langone, whose donations to the university’s hospital system had led it to be renamed in his honor, was en route. The octogenarian had stomach pain, and Room 20 was kept empty for him, medical workers said. Upon his arrival, Mr. Langone was whisked into the room, treated for a bacterial infection and sent home.

The next spring, Senator Chuck Schumer accompanied his wife, who had a fever and was short of breath, to the emergency room. As sicker patients were treated in the hallway, the couple were ushered into Room 20, where they received expedited Covid-19 tests, according to workers who witnessed the scene. The tests came back negative.

NYU Langone denies putting V.I.P.s first, but 33 medical workers told The New York Times that they had seen such patients receive preferential treatment in Room 20, one of the largest private spaces in the department. One doctor was surprised to find an orthopedic specialist in the room awaiting a senior hospital executive’s mother with hip pain. Another described an older hospital trustee who was taken to Room 20 when he was short of breath after exercising.

The privileged treatment is part of a broader pattern, a Times investigation found. For years, NYU’s emergency room in Manhattan has secretly given priority to donors, trustees, politicians, celebrities, and their friends and family, according to 45 medical workers, internal hospital records and other confidential documents reviewed by The Times.

On hospital computers, electronic medical charts sometimes specify whether patients have donated to the hospital or how they are connected to executives, according to screenshots taken by frustrated doctors in recent years and shared with The Times.

“Major trustee, please prioritize,” said one from July 2020.

Dozens of doctors said they felt pressure to put V.I.P.s first. Many witnessed such patients jumping ahead of sicker people for CT scans and M.R.I.s. Some said medical specialists, often in short supply, were diverted from other cases to attend to mild complaints from high-priority patients.

Many hospitals offer exclusive concierge services to the rich. But emergency rooms are built around the premise of medical triage: that the sickest patients, regardless of their ability to pay, are treated first. Everyone else has to wait.

At NYU Langone, one of the country’s pre-eminent medical institutions, some doctors said that process had been upended.

“As emergency department doctors, we have two important skills: triage and resuscitation,” said Dr. Kimbia Arno, who worked in the emergency room in 2020 and 2021. “This system is in direct defiance of what we do and what we were trained to do.”

“The stress on providers is harmful,” said Dr. Anand Swaminathan, a physician in the emergency room from 2009 to 2018. “It’s the fact that I am getting multiple calls, from multiple people, asking me to drop everything to treat a V.I.P.”

Eleven doctors told The Times that they had resigned from the emergency department in part because they objected to favoring V.I.P.s.

Some residents — doctors in their first years of practice — complained to the national organization that accredits medical training programs. The frustrations included NYU’s “special treatment” of trustees, donors and their families, according to documents reviewed by The Times. The group’s subsequent investigation confirmed that some doctors “felt pressured to see V.I.P. patients first” and that they “experience a sense of fear and intimidation and retaliation for not expediting V.I.P. patient care.”

The Internal Revenue Service requires nonprofit hospitals like NYU, which avoids $250 million a year in taxes, to benefit their communities. A primary way to meet the requirement is to run an emergency room that is open to everyone.

But at NYU, poor people sometimes struggle to be seen. For example, ambulance workers said nurses in the emergency room routinely discouraged them from dropping off homeless or intoxicated patients. Instead, they were often shuttled to nearby Bellevue, a strained public hospital that primarily treats the poor.

A Times series this year has found that many nonprofit hospitals have strayed from their charitable roots to maximize profits. Giant hospital systems illegally sent exorbitant bills to Medicaid patients. They used hospitals in poor neighborhoods to qualify for steep drug discounts, funneling the proceeds into wealthier neighborhoods. Others cut staff to dangerously low levels.

NYU’s chief of hospital operations, Dr. Fritz François, denied that the hospital favored donors, trustees and other prominent patients. He said that patients received treatment based on how sick they were, regardless of their wealth or status, and that the emergency room treated many low-income and homeless patients.

“We do not have a V.I.P. program,” Dr. François wrote in a letter to The Times. “We do not have V.I.P. patients. We do not have V.I.P. floors. We do not have V.I.P. rooms. We do not have V.I.P. clinical teams. We do not offer V.I.P. care.”

Lisa Greiner, a spokeswoman for NYU Langone, confirmed that Mr. Langone had been treated in Room 20, which she said was “absolutely appropriate” based on his symptoms. She said the room served a variety of purposes, including privacy. She said no patient, including Mr. Langone, “has ever been treated in an isolated room at the expense of any other patient’s care.”

Mr. Langone said, “As a matter of personal integrity I have never asked for any special treatment at the hospital, and they have never offered.”

Angelo Roefaro, a spokesman for Mr. Schumer, said the protocol for the senator’s security detail was “to have the senator stay, whenever possible, in a secure location.”

Andrew C. Phillips, a lawyer for NYU, said some of the doctors who had spoken to The Times were motivated to disparage the hospital. Dr. Arno, for example, had been in a fellowship program and was passed over for a permanent job, he said. Mr. Phillips also said Dr. Swaminathan had never voiced concerns to hospital leaders about V.I.P.s.

Dr. François acknowledged that NYU’s electronic medical records sometimes included notations describing patients as “friends and family.” But he said these labels were available for all hospital employees — even the cousins of security guards and housekeepers — and enabled employees to pay courtesy visits to such patients.

“Our friends and family do not receive different or better medical care,” Dr. François wrote. He added, “Our friends and family don’t skip the triage process, don’t jump any lines, don’t get placed in any special rooms or floors and don’t get fed any differently.”

Dozens of doctors and other emergency room staff said that, when it came to many V.I.P.s, that was simply not true.

An E.R.’s Transformation

In 2007, the New York University Medical Center was in grave financial trouble.

Were it not for royalties from an arthritis drug developed by one of its researchers, the hospital would have lost $150 million that year. The patent’s expiration was looming.

A lifeline came from Mr. Langone, the founder of Home Depot and chairman of the hospital’s board of trustees. He and his wife donated $100 million in 2008, matching a contribution they had made eight years earlier. The medical center was renamed NYU Langone.

Mr. Langone became known not just for his own philanthropy — he donated another $100 million in 2019 — but also his ability to persuade other wealthy New Yorkers to donate. Over the ensuing years, he helped the hospital raise $3 billion.

In 2012, the run-down emergency room, on the East River in Midtown Manhattan, was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. It reopened two years later with more space and a new name, the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Emergency Services, named for the billionaire who financed its construction.

The emergency department’s longtime chair, an outspoken champion of serving the needy, stepped down in 2015. Around then, several doctors said, they began receiving requests from administrators to give priority to V.I.P.s.

“Suddenly, we started getting these phone calls that X person is coming in, they are X relation to board member, and we were given the strong sense that you had to push them to the front of the line,” said Dr. Swaminathan, who worked in the emergency room at the time.

NYU was not the only prestigious nonprofit hospital system finding ways to cater to donors and other wealthy patients.

In San Francisco, the UCSF Medical Center rewarded donors with faster access to top cardiologists. Stanford Medical Center gave wealthy patients red blankets to distinguish them from everyone else. (Spokeswomen for those medical centers said they no longer provided such perks.)

Today, top New York hospitals like Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell offer luxury accommodations and personal concierge services to patients who can afford them.

And emergency room workers at several elite academic medical centers said in interviews that, as at NYU, administrators sometimes requested expedited treatment for well-connected patients.

“The hospitals are acting as businesses,” said Dr. Renee Hsia, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who researches emergency room care. “They can often garner much more revenue from these patients that are huge donors.”

Am I being too cynical for assuming this happens everywhere?

Like, even Scrubs and ER back in the 90s/00s had multiple episodes about it.

I have a really hard time being upset that the man who gave $100 million to a hospitable, raised another $3 billion, and helped make a medical school at one of the country’s most famous universities (NYU) free is able to get a room instead of sitting in the hallway when he shows up to the hospital.

And also gee, really? They put a United States senator in a room instead of treating him in a hallway in an emergency room that could present a security threat with (according to their own admission) mentally ill and intoxicated persons walking around? Shocking.

>A lifeline came from Mr. Langone, the founder of Home Depot and chairman of the hospital’s board of trustees. He and his wife donated $100 million in 2008, matching a contribution they had made eight years earlier. The medical center was renamed NYU Langone.

>Mr. Langone became known not just for his own philanthropy — he donated another $100 million in 2019 — but also his ability to persuade other wealthy New Yorkers to donate. Over the ensuing years, he helped the hospital raise $3 billion.

Man gives $300 million of his own money and helped raise $3 billion but hey, no preferential treatment.

This article sounds very much like a member of the Sulzberger family which owns the Times did not get the right flavor of Jello in the hospital so this hatchet job was ordered.

Seemingly no one responding has read the full article. Yea, the guy who the hospital is named after getting quick treatment isn't an egregious example of what the article is trying to highlight. Is it ethical? Probably not. But that's the realities of medicine sometimes

The real issues here are:

the administrative retaliation against staff who voiced their concerns

Making it a practice of not admitting patients due to being uninsured

People with nonurgent medical needs cutting the line for CT scans

NYU gets 250m a year in tax breaks in exchange for 'serving the community'.

Was the man the hospital is literally named after and a senator with security concerns truly the most egregious examples they could find? I worked in outpatient healthcare for several years, yes VIPs(celebrities, major donors, and politicians) were put in rooms quickly and depending on security risks brought in through a private entrance. This isn’t unusual but at the end of the day they weren’t receiving different medical treatment just being treated with kid gloves. I would be shocked if NYU didn’t operate this way. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes those are the people who make donations that allow you to keep doors open, and to expand care to even more patients.

That said it is problematic in the ER if a VIP with a less urgent concern is prioritized over another patient in the ER solely due to their VIP status. Putting them in a private room to wait and receive treatment isn’t problematic, prioritizing them over other patients is though. I’m not sure that this article really proves how much that it happening.

I hate to say it but I don't think this is an NYU-specific problem... I work in an ED in NYC and not too long ago, the vice chair called to give me the heads up that our hospital CEO's nephew was being brought in. I essentially asked what I was supposed to do with that information and the conversation went like this:

​

Vice Chair: "I want you to treat him like ...."

Me: *interrupting before they finish, "...like any other patient"

(I thought they were going to make the point that everybody is equal and we treat everybody the best we can)

Vice Chair: "No. I want you to treat them like CEO's nephew!"

​

I also trained at a different hospital in NYC and they too would "reserve" inpatient beds for VIPs before they even arrived at the hospital. We were told not to give those beds away to another patient, including patients who had clearly been there longer, waiting for an inpatient bed to open up.

This is nothing new, every hospital that has a board of trustees and donors do the same thing. Regardless every patients gets triaged, and if they’re truly critical they’ll get seen just as quick. Maybe not in a “special room” but that’s not really important when you’re dying.

"Business favors customers that help keep the lights on."

Sounds right to me.

They’ve also received millions in donations from Langone that allowed them to progress research and build new facilities. Treating the guy did all this is a bad thing?

For that one person he displaced in his emergency, he’s probably saved hundreds of others with his donation

i mean yea, but doesn't seem like this has much displacement cost.

Big point for people who don’t work in medicine. This was specifically a problem for ER visits not genera hospitalization. VIP wings are nothing new but expedited care in the ED is egregious

I think this is actually a great sign on how our accessible hospitals are pretty great. I would imagine a billionaire has access to all sorts of publicly known (like Sollis) and stuff the public doesn’t know about, private ER services. And yet they choose to share the hospital with the rest of the city. That’s a great sign

I mean, not defending any social status-based prioritization of healthcare services, but prioritizing a “major trustee” of the university is not just “favoring the rich”. A Board of Trustees is the top governing structure of a university. People who serve on it have made a major, sustained commitment of money, time, and effort to advancing the school’s interests and stature. This isn’t just a case of “this guy is rich let’s give them better healthcare”. This is more along the lines of “look sharp the boss is here”.

lololol this story is such a outrage reach

Here's a comment I just found on the nytimes website:

>S.B.

>S.F. Dec. 22

>There should be no Ronald O. Perelman Center for Emergency Services.

>There should be no NYU Langone Medical Center.

>There should be no Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.

>Every last individual with their name on the facade of a hospital because they coughed up millions of dollars should have been TAXED at least that much to pay for those hospitals. Then they can be named after people who devoted their lives to caring for the sick.

This will surely encourage more large donations.

What an idiot!

crazy how many of you are making the jump from "i'm not surprised by this" to "this is a completely appropriate practice for a nonprofit hospital subsidized by my tax dollars." also diverting patients to a public hospital means that when they can't pay for their care, the city picks up the cost instead.

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I thought this was a given? If I give tens of millions to a hospital I want priority treatment.

Presume the donations over the years have had a major net benefit to others.

Object to politicians skipping the line though.

This seems universal.

Most hospitals have VIP rooms designated, some even VIP wings and suites.

You really think Bill Clinton didn’t get special treatment for his heart surgery years ago? He didn’t even check himself in. His staff and the hospital would have coordinated all that, and taken steps to protect his privacy. I’m sure the staff who took care of him were all hand selected. Even down to whomever cleaned the room.

Your poor ass gets whatever is available. If available, you get whatever doctor is on duty.

If someone donated the funds to buy the CT machine that thousands are using every month, I wouldn't mind having that person skip the line if they needed a CT scan.

This is how we wind up with Trauma Team Platinum

I took my kid to Maimonides ER for a possible broke bone and waited for a long time. After a while a kid comes in and he was yelling a lot and also for a possible broken bone. Because the the screaming that kid got his X-ray right and the doctor saw him. The kid had no broken bone and was fine, he kept screaming that they did another X-ray and the doctor saw him again. My kid got a X-ray too but we haven’t seen the doctor. After our X-ray the screaming kid got two X-rays and saw the doctor twice while we were waiting. I had to complained to get the doctors to look at my kid’s X-ray. The PA response was how did I know all this happened? I said I could hear the conversation through the cloth curtains. I could understand why the saw the other kid first because of the screaming but why the second time when they knew nothing was wrong?

I have friends who work in hospitals who gotten their family and friends seen first.

Well color me surprised!

Literally all hospitals have VIP floors

This is America. Where rich people with the flu take priority over someone dying in front of a doctor. No surprising here.

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Oh no, anyway...

Any hospital/medical office or business will favor known entities. This is not news. Would I be annoyed if my grandma got skipped in line for her Ct scan, sure, but I wouldn’t think the entire medical system needs to be revamped because of it as some suggested above. Stupid article. Not news.

Skels

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A “pro-tip” for anyone concerned with preferential treatment in the ER. Take an ambulance, regardless of your symptoms, the priory is to get the EMS crew back on the street and you’ll be given a spot quicker than someone in the waiting room who has the same symptoms as you.