Authors: Prabhu AV, Lehrer EJ, Clump DA, Kim T.
Abstract
Background: The health care industry has a diverse group of stakeholders who seek relationships within government to help ensure that certain interests are considered in the legislative process. One of these mechanisms of engagement is enabled through political action committees (PACs), which contribute to federal campaigns and influence candidates and legislation.
Objectives: The purpose of this study was to characterize the federal political contributions of American radiation oncologists (ROs). We hypothesized that ROs have contributed mostly to specialty-focused PACs and increased their political contributions over the last 15 years.
Methods: Institutional review board approval was not needed due to the public nature of this study. Public finance data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) containing information on individual contributions to a federal candidate or committee was obtained from 2003 through 2018. Data was filtered to only include physicians self-identifying as ROs with individual information associated with the contributor’s state, contribution date, and dollar amount. Contribution recipients were then linked to specific candidates or committees using the FEC’s public campaign finance data, and contribution recipients were manually classified as PAC or a Presidential, Senate, or House candidate or committee. Each individual PAC receiving contributions was noted, such as ASTROPAC (The American Society for Radiation Oncology Political Action Committee), RADPAC (Radiology Political Action Committee), or ACROPAC (American College of Radiation Oncology Political Action Committee). Each recipient candidate and PAC was then classified as Democrat, Republican, or other political party based on FEC designations and overall spending patterns greater than fifty percent to any one political party as detailed by the Center for Responsive Politics (a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group that monitors the flow of money to candidates for political office). Data was analyzed temporally and geographically, in aggregate, and by individual radiation oncologist using summative statistics. Spearman’s rho was used to assess the presence of trends in contributions, where the null- hypothesis was rejected for p<0.05.
Results: From 2003 to 2018, the FEC reported a total of 31,646,000 federal political contributions. Exactly 4,617 federal political contributions were made from 1,021 unique self- identified ROs, totaling $3,350,137. The number of ROs making contributions ranged from 56 in 2005 to 600 in 2016 (mean 289 ± 191.4 ROs yearly), with the mean total annual contribution of $209,384 with a range of $28,952 in 2005 to $543,764 in 2016. The average contribution was $725.61 but amounts ranged considerably (range $1 in 2011, 2012, and 2013 to $35,800 in 2011). Of all RO dollars, 75.4% went to Democrats, 23.8% to Republicans, and 0.8% to others. From 2003-2008, Republicans received the majority of contributions, while Democrats received the majority of contributions during the remaining time frame from 2009-2018. Most RO dollars (81.0%) went to PACs rather than candidates, with the majority of those PAC dollars (50.2%) directed toward ASTROPAC followed by RADPAC (13.6%). ACROPAC received only 0.4% of total PAC dollars. There was a positive annual trend in RO contributions to the House, (=0.58, p<0.02), PACs (=0.85, p<0.0001), Democrats (=0.84, p<0.001), and overall (=0.8, p<0.001).
There was not a significant trend seen in RO contributions over time to Presidential candidates (=0.71, p<0.06) or to the Senate (=0.49, p<0.07).
Conclusions: ROs’ federal political contributions have increased almost 19-fold over the last decade and a half and continues to be an increasing trend. This growth overwhelmingly represents contributions to specialty-focused PACs (ASTROPAC) supporting both Democratic and Republican candidates.
Conference/Symposium/Course name, dates and location where the work was supposed to be presented:
102nd Annual American Radium Society Meeting. Scottsdale, AZ. May 16-19, 2020