Health-care campaign contributions for Senators Kit Bond and Sam Brownback

For today’s August-recess-celebrating tally of how much medical-industry money is going to the campaigns of metro-area politicians, we’ve decided to be extra efficient.

We’ve already counted the totals for Sen. Pat Roberts ($525,000), Congressman Dennis Moore ($62,000), Sen. Claire McCaskill ($132,000) and Congressman Sam Graves ($85,500). Today, we’ve decided to combine the lists for Senators Kit Bond (Republican of Missouri) and Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas) in one entry.

Neither man really needed any money, but both cashed checks from the health-care industry anyway.

Sen. Kit Bond hasn’t run since 2004 (his last Senate race, when he defeated Democrat Nancy Farmer with 56 percent of the vote). In January, he announced that he’ll retire instead of running again in 2010. So we’ll see what happens to the $1,419,774 he raised in 2007-2008. Of that, $20,500 came from medical-industry interests:

$5,000
Schering-Plough Corp.
Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc.

$3,000
Vision Council of America

$2,000
Blue Cross and Blue Shield

$1,000
Abbott Laboratories
Centene Corp.
Healthsouth
Missouri Hospital Association
Steris Corporation

$500
Pfizer

Brownback, meanwhile, ran essentially unopposed in 2006 (sorry, Lee Jones). He raised a relatively paltry $398,410 (more than $126,590 less than Roberts banked in medical-industry contributions alone!) Of that, $11,500 came from medical-industry interests:

$3,500
Amgen Inc.

$2,000
Eli Lilly and Co.

$1,500
Cooperative of American Physicians

$1,000
Bayer Corp.
Johnson & Johnson
Premier Inc.
Zeneca Inc.

$500
Pfizer

That $500 from Pfizer is another thing the two men have in common. The pharmaceutical giant has so much cash to spend on political contributions ($10,000 for Roberts; $5,000 for Graves; $2,000 for Moore) that it has a thousand bucks to toss at two candidates who don’t even need it. Apparently just for the hell of it.