THIS PAST SUNDAY, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Jake Tapper quizzed her about a working paper that had concluded “Medicare for All” would cost the government $32.6 trillion over a 10-year period. CNN’s chyron told viewers the research came from George Mason University.

The paper touched off controversy when it was released in July, because buried in the findings was an estimate that the $32.6 trillion price tag would also result in a $2 trillion savings over national expenditures on health care, relative to the status quo. Designed to create sticker shock for “Medicare for All,” instead the study inadvertently proved a point of progressive supporters of single payer.

The Mercatus Center, which gets most of its funding from foundations like the Koch family foundations, scrambled to dispute its own finding. Working paper author Charles Blahous argued that an alternative scenario he constructed using higher provider payment rates (which, by definition, costs more money) is actually the correct one. This makes no sense, since “Medicare for All” is based on Medicare rates. But fact-checking organizations largely took Blahous’s side, while making factual errors over and over again and attributing incorrect statements to “Medicare for All” supporters.

Throughout this debacle, as in this story from the Associated Press, the working paper is routinely identified as an “analysis by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia.” When a Mercatus senior outreach associate sent repeated emails to policymakers touting the working paper and fact-check articles that adopted the think tank’s spin, she also identified herself as coming from “the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.”

This association with a college gives Mercatus the imprimatur of academic research, something to be taken more seriously by the media than the flurry of white papers churned out by ideological think tanks.

The Intercept wanted to learn more about how Mercatus sought to massage public opinion and contain the fallout from the unintended implications of their paper. George Mason University is a public university in Virginia that is subject to the state’s Freedom of Information Act, which The Intercept used to request communications between Mercatus and members of the media.

That’s when The Intercept learned that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is not, apparently, part of George Mason University.

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