This happened a couple of months before the 2008 presidential election:
Keeping patients who don't need emergency care out of the emergency room seems like a good idea. But a program aimed at doing that has earned University of Chicago Medical Center a question-filled letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has been looking into whether big-money nonprofit hospitals are doing enough to keep their tax-free status....Hmmm ... a hospital with ties to a Democratic presidential candidate getting its tax-exempt status scrutinized by a top Republican. Nothing unseemly there, right?
It’s a particularly charged issue because Barack Obama’s wife Michelle Obama, an executive at the med center, was one of the leaders of the project, known as the Urban Health Initiative. Grassley's letter cites a front-page story from the Washington Post that looked at work David Axelrod did on the project before he became chief strategist of Obama's campaign....
