Political infighting has placed the proposed Phoenix medical school on life support.

Three legislative committees, as they did in the budget that Governor Napolitano vetoed in March, have denied her $7 million request as start-up money for the school. Groundbreaking ceremonies for the medical campus in downtown Phoenix, a cooperative venture between the University of Arizona College of Medicine and Arizona State University, were postponed earlier this month.

The Senate Appropriations Committee on April 28 rejected an amendment by Sen. Jorge Garcia, D-27, for $6 million for the school.

Committee chairman Sen. Robert Burns, R-9, attempted a compromise with Democrats by authoring a budget amendment that would establish a $5 million medical education fund to be overseen by a special joint legislative committee. The proposed committee would review plans for the school and submit a report by the end of the year.

The governor’s Arizona Commission on Medical Education and Research was to have submitted a plan in March, but Ms. Napolitano extended the deadline to mid-June.

Mr. Burns, needing bipartisan support for his amendment, did not offer it in committee when Democrats said they would not support it. As it stood after the meeting, the new budget proposal only appropriates $50,000 for a “Phoenix medical school report.”

“I can tell you what my problem with the medical school is,” Mr. Burns said. “There’s no plan of action. Why would we put aside 10 cents on a project that has absolutely no plan?”

He said legislators don’t know if or how the school plans to use teaching hospitals in the Valley, including Maricopa County Medical Center, and he was critical of the UofA Medical School for discouraging teaching hospitals from granting clinical rotations to osteopathic students from Midwestern University in Glendale, a private medical school.

“We’ve got Midwestern medical school out there. Are they going to be a participant or are they going to be locked out?” Mr. Burns asked. “We’re trying to make a good faith effort by setting aside some money to indicate that we support going forward, but we don’t want to go forward until we’ve got something that makes sense.”

Senate Democratic Leader Linda Aguirre and Assistant Leader Harry Mitchell took their case for the medical school and against Mr. Burns’s amendment to reporters in the Capitol pressroom after the Appropriations Committee meeting.

“This is what we need the $7 million for — to set the proposal in place,” Ms. Aguirre said. “There is a plan. They’re asking for the seed money to put this plan in place. We support putting more doctors in our community.”

Mr. Mitchell said, “There was no money for the medical school in this bill, none at all. We have a growing population and fewer and fewer doctors. There are more teaching hospitals up here. No one has said, Let’s make UofA bigger.”

While the Appropriations Committee was meeting, the Board of Regents and the Governor’s Office circulated two reports on the medical school that outlined projected state costs and challenges for the school. The timing of the reports, Arizona Capitol Times was told, resulted from a meeting between Sen. Carolyn Allen, R-8, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, and Ms. Napolitano. Ms. Allen said she told the governor to quickly get more information to the Legislature if a medical school appropriation were ever to be approved.

The Board of Regents report deals mainly with infrastructure of the medical campus, planned for the old Phoenix Union High School campus at Seventh Street and Van Buren. The report projects state funding requirements for the first six years at $82 million, including $13.5 million for the ASU biomedical program, and states that the UofA will contribute $21 million in operating costs and more than $17 million in capital investment.

When the medical school enrollment reaches around 150 first-year students, the report said, “It will require separate actions by the state several years into the future.”

“If the Phoenix program steps up to 150 new students… and the Tucson program expands slightly to 120 new medical students each year, Arizona will be producing as many as 270 practicing physicians every year in response to the keenly felt societal need for doctors in this growing state,” the regents report said.

“Contrary to certain perceptions, only a fraction of medical school graduates focus solely on research,” the report said. “It is anticipated that the students . . . will practice in hospitals, private offices and clinics throughout the state.”

Some legislators, including Sen. Robert Cannell, D-24, have expressed concerns that the medical school will concentrate on graduating physicians who intend to go into research.

In addition to the regents report and a draft report submitted to the governor’s medical education commission by Kurt Salmon Associates, Ms. Napolitano’s press secretary e-mailed reporters with a document called “Exploding the Myths” about the Phoenix medical school.

“While university officials cannot guarantee that all medical school graduates will become health care providers . . . only a very small fraction of current medical school graduates become full-time researchers,” the e-mail stated. “The research connection to TGEN (Translational Genomics Research Institute), as well as other biomedical research initiatives, will provide medical students (as they become licensed physicians) with cutting-edge information and training that will translate ultimately to provide better health care for all Arizonans.”

Part of the Phoenix medical program will be cancer research and treatment at the Phoenix Bioscience Center at Copper Square.

Current plans do not call for construction of a hospital to serve as a teaching facility for the Phoenix medical school. The medical program will use a number of Valley hospitals to train third-and-fourth-year students and, eventually, first-and-second-year students.

The Salmon report, which called “for discussion only,” states, “If a teaching hospital model is to be sustained, then at least some of the current UofA affiliated teaching hospitals in Phoenix will have to make major strategic and mission decisions to fully embrace the educational and research missions necessary to achieve comparability with the schools at ‘research’ universities.”

On research, the report concludes that clinical training sites and legislative funding are the highest priorities for opening the medical school, “with details of research to follow or to evolve…” —