Ah, politics… |:/
Everyone has opinions, of course, and I think you can tell whereabout mine range when I tell you that citing Fox News as a step in your politics-based research makes my eyes roll violently in my head.
Nevertheless! I am here to help, not judge (the judging is for my off-hours).
The question was: which Democrats are taking money from Blue Cross/Blue Shield [to vote against Barack Obama's health plan]? I could not really hazard a guess as to politicians’ motivations, but I Googled “lobbyist money” and found opensecrets.org, wherein campaign financing and leadership (party, I’m assuming..?) Political Action Committee donations are documented, as reported by the Federal Election Commission.
So, Blue Cross/Blue Shield donated $1,332,618 to Democrats in 2008, and $1,306,481 to Republicans in 2008, mostly through PACs. Recipients included 136 House Democrats and 36 Democratic Senators.
That’s all well and good, but to completely answer the question, I also need to know the stances of each of these politicians with regard to the proposed health care plan.
There are questions that are fun and intriguing to work on …and then there are questions that are EVEN MORE fun and intriguing to work on. /:|
A number of fruitless searches for “health care votes”, “health care voting records” and so forth, before I narrowed in on the most likely reported on aspect with a search for “public option votes.”
This pointed to a mid-August FiveThirtyEight article about votes for the public option that might be gotten in the senate, citing an early August Open Left whip count, where mostly Democratic – some Republican and Independent – senator stances on just the public option portion of the health care proposal were reported. And this is as far as I got before the patron, who’d originally called in, showed up to collect what information I’d found. I explained what I’d done, what I couldn’t do (read minds), and that the patron could try and do their own corollary-finding between those who took BCBS funding and those indicating that they’d vote “no” or “maybe”, of the senators.
Conclusion: WIN.. I guess? The patron went away content that this data could be passed on to someone else to “make [a prominent politician] squirm”. …See me in my off-hours for further comment.
Tags: campaign finances, health care, health insurance, lobbyists, patrons, politics, public option, reference
