One of the reasons health care reform has been so difficult to implement in the U.S. is the lobbying power that health insurance companies hold with Congress.
The Sunlight Foundation recently began publishing a series of data visualizations that clarify the nature and power of those relationships.
Here’s how Sunlight explains the project:
“In total, five committees will have held hearings on the issue and marked up a bill to reform the health care system in the U.S. One of those committees stands out as the key arbiter on the many sticking points of the proposed legislation, the Senate Finance Committee.
“The Finance Committee contains a high volume of lawmakers with close ties to the health and insurance industries through both campaign contributions and personal relationships. The visualizations below highlight these influences by mapping former staffers of Finance Committee members who have since become lobbyists for health and insurance interests and showing the number of contributions given to the committee members from these industries.”
What I like about this project is that it started relatively simply, with one infographic produced from a visualization, and expanded into more complex and explorable visualizations as Sunlight pursued its analysis further. Paul Blumenthal wrote a series of related blog posts:
- “The Max Baucus Health Care Lobbyist Complex“: Full info graphic. (June 22)
- “Senate Finance Committee Health Care Influence Cluster: The Democrats“: This visualization has been made explorable through a Google Maps interface, “courtesy of Google and the UCL Google Maps Image Cutter. The graph/map was generated using the Graph library of Nodebox.” (June 29)
- “Senate Finance Committee Health Care Influence Cluster: The Republicans“: This is another static info graphic, but it’s being distributed via Scribd — a document-sharing and collaboration service that enables embedding and other useful features. (July 10)
Yes, I know this package of features isn’t brand new, but it has ongoing relevance as the health care reform story unfolds. I discovered it because it’s currently featured at the top of the Sunlight Foundation home page.
This is a great example of how to build from blog posts and third-party tools to demonstrate ongoing relevance and thus attract an ongoing stream of inbound links and traffic from research, while increasing distribution through embedding. This can yield far more value to the publisher — and the public — than trying to cram the research into a traditional news story.
