Blue Dog U.S. Representative Kathy Dahlkemper has a lot to say about the health care policies of our federal government. Voters may assume that Dahlkemper’s health care policy positions come from disinterested analysis of the needs of Americans and the best practices achievable with the resources available. Yet, donations to Dahlkemper’s re-election campaign in 2010 create the impression that Dahlkemper’s political career is critically dependent upon the support of corporations and individuals that have a direct financial stake in the shape of health care reform.

Dahlkemper doesn’t have a strong activist base of supporter back home in the 3rd district of Pennsylvania. Two thirds of the donations she has received for her re-election campaign so far come from PACs – political action committees which operate on the national level.

Of the remaining one-third of individual donations, many are from out of state as well. These are individuals like William Bianco, a lawyer from Denver, Colorado; Andrew Dodson, a lobbyist with the Bockorny Group, in Bethesda, Maryland; and David Fontaine, a senior vice president at USIS, a private security firm that profits from contracts awarded by the federal government.

There are many industries which have donated to Representative Dahlkemper’s re-election campaign committee. In the top 10 professional categories of donors, the Center for Responsive Politics includes “Health Professionals”. Of these donations, only 11 percent come from individuals working as health professionals. The 89 percent remaining come from PACs that represent health professionals of one sort and another.

In addition to these donations, there is yet more money coming from yet more PACs, leadership PACs run by individual politicians, which funnel more money from the health care industry to politicians. For example, Dahlkemper has taken $10,000 from AmeriPAC, a political action committee operated by Representative Steny Hoyer. In turn, the professional sector that provides the most donations to AmeriPAC is the health care sector, which has donated $87,500 to the PAC so far in the present campaign cycle.

There’s a great deal of money coming from the health care industry to U.S. Representative Dahlkemper, to support her re-election. It bears consideration that this money has been provided as Dahlkemper, along with other Blue Dog Democrats, has been involved in extensive maneuvering to make adjustments to health care reform legislation that ensures that private health care companies can continue to make strong profits.

Only a genuine psychic could tell us what Kathy Dahlkemper’s actual motivations have been. Voters will have to consider Dahlkemper’s external behavior – including the patterns in her fundraising activities – as they decide whether she is worthy of another 2 years of their trust.