Original Message

Yes, asking about insurance frowned upon.  But say you have a helicopter flying in support of a larger hospital system, and two requests come in.  Request A, 50 yo female head bleed from hospital in affluent suburb.  Request B, 26 male GSW from hospital in not so nice neighborhood.  Which one do you fly and which one gets magnanimously sent to a competitor?  If the patients are in hospitals in same system, they know quite well already what insurance they have, or not have.  That decision is made well before the helicopter is dispatched.