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If you want to get your own scoop on the health care debate, there are lots of easy on-line tools to help, all sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation. You can read the bill, follow the money, see where lawmakers are partying (and with whom), check out how health care lobbying interests are interrelated, and more.
Reading the bill. I've already blogged about OpenCongress.org and how you can use this site to get the text of the health care proposals winding through Congress, down to the very last comma. But there are also other OpenCongress features that also come in handy.
For example, you can create your own accountt and personalize the site so that you can quickly see any updates to a bill that you are tracking, like H.R. 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009.
You can also track particular lawmakers, such as Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) or Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), both key players in the health care debate.You can check out voting records, check out committees (for example, Senate Finance is an important committee in the debate), and vote on bills yourself.
Visit the site for a full tour of all of OpenCongress.org's features
Follow the money. OpenSecrets.org is an absolute treasure trove of information about how much health care interests are spending campaign contributions and lobbying.
Click around here to see contributions by health care interests to members of Congress and political parties. You can parse it out by House, Senate, election cycle, top donors, and many more features.
Here's where to go to get the goods on spending by health care interests on lobbying. (Warning: the numbers here may boggle your mind.)
The folks behind the scenes at OpenSecrets.org have also created this handyhealth care cheat sheet.
It's also easy to get the details on a particular lawmaker. Here is the "career" profile for Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT); you can see at a glance that his top donors include the health care professionals, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals/nursing homes, and HMOs. You can look up his personal financial disclosure forms here. (According to his 2007 disclosure form, nine percent of his investments were in health care companies.) Rinse and repeat for Sen. Grassley and other lawmakers entrenched in the health care debate--or check out your own representatives in Congress.
You can also personalize OpenSecrets.org to follow particular lawmakers, Political Action Committees (PACs), industries, and so on.
You can find online tour of the site here.
Find the parties. Over at Party Time, the Sunlight Foundation tracks the congressional fundraisers and parties that happen in Washington, DC and beyond, often hosted by lobbyists.
Browse around the database by searching for particular lawmakers (Here are Sen. Baucus' parties, and here are Grassley's.) Check out all the parties mentioning "health" in the invitations.
You can also look at parties by Congressional committee. For example, here are all the parties for members of the Senate Finance Committee, and here are parties for the House Ways and Means Committee, both key health care committees.
Party Time blog posts related to health care can be found here. One of my favoritesis this post on a June fundraiser for Sen. Grassley that was hosted by a lobbyist for an alternative medicine organization. The Sunlight Foundation's Paul Blumenthal follow up later with this post after the fact, showing that Grassley collected health care PAC contributions around that time.
If you want to dig deeper, there are still more tools available. The Institute for Money in State Politics tracks campaign money to state legislators.
LittleSis.org is described as an "involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans," where you can see the ties between influential figures in the health care debate. At Maplight.org, you can trace how campaign money affects votes.
Whether you have hours--or far more likely, minutes--to visit these different sites, you will be sure to get a different perspective about the health care debate than you have been getting from the mainstream media. All of these tools are designed to help illuminate how our representatives in Washington make decisions, and to help bloggers and journalists ferret out information for themselves. Over at the Sunlight Foundation, we'd love your feedback--and we wish you happy and healthy clicking.
