Wealthy patients needling doctors

Wealthy clients of pricey medical-concierge services are pestering their doctors about when they can get the COVID-19 vaccine as industry experts warn about the rich and powerful trying to cut the line for the shot.

“I think there’s abuse in a lot of things in health care ... I think there’s a lot of overutilization in medicine. I don’t see why this would be any different,” Dr. Tiffany Sizemore, who runs Concierge Consultants & Cardiology in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., told The Post.

“Most people really want me to be able to answer that burning question for them, which is when will I have the vaccine and when will I be able to give it to them,” said the doctor, who fields three to four text messages or calls a day about the vaccine.

Dr. Bill Lang, medical director of WorldClinic, a concierge service that charges members up to $250,000 a year for 24/7 care, echoed those concerns to the STAT medical-news Web site.

“I’ve had at least three texts or calls every day just asking, ‘When do you think I can get a vaccine?’ ” Lang told the site.

He told STAT that his patients haven’t asked for special treatment and that his clinic would not offer it anyway, but predicted that line-cutting would be inevitable in the broader system.

Dr. Ellen Wasserman, who runs the on-demand COVID-19 testing service The MediMobile in New Jersey, said her clients have one question: “How fast can we get it?”

Still, she said she’s confident patients and doctors will do the right thing.

Bioethicists and other medical experts aren’t convinced.

For example, rich people could easily get their doctors to designate a medical condition as high risk and thus qualify them for early access to a vaccine, STAT noted.

“It’s a market-based economy. You as a doctor want to keep your clients coming back,” Jonathan Cushing of the nonprofit Transparency International, which focuses on global corruption, told STAT.