Earmark in Senate Bill Would Offer $100-Million to Unnamed Medical Facility With University Tie

The mammoth health-care bill over which the U.S. Senate labored all weekend would provide a $100-million windfall to a university-affiliated health-care facility — but which one? The bill doesn’t say, but of course that’s the usual practice with earmarks. Instead, according to an article in The New York Times, the bill would instruct the Obama administration to make the money available to a facility “affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in a state where there is only one public medical and dental school.” Senate aides scratched their heads and claimed ignorance, the Times reports, but a lobbyist for the Association of American Medical Colleges, Atul Grover, guessed Commonweath Medical College, in Scranton, Pa. Its president, Robert M. D’Alessandri, said it did sound like the institution fit the bill, but he wasn’t sure.