I followed a link from LaFeminista's diary and found a great chart in the Washington Post. It sorts the vote on HCR by party, person, district, campaign contributions from the Health Care Industry, and percent in district without insurance. It also has a nice bar feature with the numbers, to help show relative proportions.
The chart is well worth a look. It even allows you to sort by each column.
I pulled the data into an excel sheet and did some playing of my own.
Note that some of these figures are NOT independent; for example, the number of high donations are fairly evenly split between the parties, but that probably just reflects officials in each party. Also, districts have differing numbers of people, so the figures for percent uninsured are reflections on congress, but not of the country in general.
In the top twenty districts with the highest percent of uninsured, only two of those are represented by Republicans (Sessions, TX-32 and Ros-Lehtinen, FL-18). These two are also two of the three highest in donations from the Health Care Industry in those 20 districts. (The 4th highest is about $160,000 less, so the differences aren't trivial.) They are also the only 'No' votes in the top 20.
(The first Dem 'No' is 24th down -- only two Dem 'No's in the top 50 states by percent uninsured.)
Overall correlation using both parties between contributions and percent uninsured is 0. (The actual value I got is - 0.003958791; I don't remember ever seeing one so close to zero before!) This means that there is no relationship between the two, taking congress as a whole (but look at the highest donation list below, which shows that those at the very top on average do have low uninsured rates). I sort of expected there to be a relationship, because I expected health care industries to be more prevalent in wealthier districts, but it might be skewed by donations to party power assignments, so many donations are to non-local reps.
MONEY = campaign contributions from the Health Care Industry
UNINSURED = Percent in District without insurance
TYPE | NUMBER | TOTAL MONEY | AVERAGE MONEY | AVERAGE UNINSURED |
---|
Dems Voting Yes | 219 | $83,682,010 | $563,974 | 23.35% |
Dems Voting No | 39 | $13,010,000 | $358,756 | 18.95% |
Reps Voting Yes | 1 | $25,550 | $25,550 | 24.00% |
Reps Voting No | 176 | $81,400,933 | $833,268 | 20.95% |
Standout information from above table: those dems who voted 'no' tended to come from districts with far fewer uninsured than the 'yes' dems.
TYPE | DEMS | REPS | AVERAGE MONEY | AVERAGE UNINSURED |
---|
MONEY $2 MIL AND ABOVE | 4 | 5 | $2,525,919 | 15.19% |
MONEY $1 MIL AND ABOVE (includes $2 mil and above) | 14 | 18 | $1,650,663 | 16.90% |
Standout information from the above table: This group tends to come from districts with far lower numbers of uninsured than congress as a whole, and it is essentially evenly split between the parties, despite the democratic supermajority. Money follows power: this group includes Rangel, Pelosi, Hoyer, Dingell and Murtha, among other dems, and Boehner, Cantor, Sessions, Blunt and Paul among the repubs.
If you want me to look at something else, let me know in the comments and I'll see if I can.