Health industry PAC contributions to senators, 2006-2010

Few issues are as important to Americans as health care. National discussion of health care reformation has occurred periodically since Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States in 1992 and recently culminated in the March 2010 passage of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act. It makes sense that PACs representing the health care industry would try to gain access to the legislative process in order to have a voice into the legislation that will determine their future role in the provision of health care. This paper explores the relationship between Senate committee membership and campaign contributions from the health care industry over three election cycles, 2006-2010. Although there have been a few papers dealing with PAC contributions from the American Medical Association and voting on particular pieces of legislation affecting the health care industry, the role of Senate committee membership and PAC contributions has not been examined with respect to the health care industry. Using contributions data obtained from the Center for Responsive Politics and individual legislator data obtained from various editions of the Almanac of American Politics we examine the relationship between campaign contributions and committee membership. The hypothesis that committee membership matters will be tested using a variation of a model developed by Grier and Munger that assumes PACs support the lowest cost providers of legislative services. The econometric technique used will be a sample selection model, reflecting the two step decision process used by PACs.  We expect to find that members of committees with oversight responsibility for the health care industry receive significantly more contributions than other Senators, ceteris paribus. The contributions of the paper are that it is the first paper to examine the relationship between PAC contributions from sectors of the health care industry and committee membership in the U.S. Senate, and it is one of a very limited number of papers that looks at the relationship between PAC contributions and membership in the U.S. Senate.