In case you missed it, the Sunlight Foundation’s own Paul Blumenthal posted the other day on parties for Senate Finance Committee members hosted by former staffers turned health care lobbyists:

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at the connections between the Senate Finance Committee and the former staffers of committee members turned health care lobbyists. Our previous posts focused solely on those connections – one visualizing the connections to committee chair Max Baucus and another showing the connections for all Democrats. Another way to look at these connections is to look at the fundraisers these lobbyists are throwing for Finance Committee members.

Read the whole post here.

When the Senate Finance Committee held a “roundtable discussion” the other week on “Financing Comprehensive Health Care Reform,” the public witness list included academics and representatives from liberal and conservative think tanks. What wasn’t on the agenda was a list of all the unofficial witnesses–all the donors who attend fundraisers for these lawmakers in the months surrounding this hearing, whose identities remain a mystery.

We found 44 fundraisers since the start of the year for members of the committee (See list below.) Whether or not the revelers have a stake in health care policy is tough to say for sure. For most of these parties, we don’t have a clue who attended (or for those in the future, who is planning to go.)

We know that on April 30, several lobbyists from the Timmons & Company, whose clients include the American Medical Association and Teva Pharmaceuticals, hosted a breakfast at The Monocle for New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. We know this only because this particular invitation is one of the few to list hosts for the event.

We also know that several of the hosts at Sen. Mike Crapo’s March 2 dinner at La Loma lobby for health care concerns. One was another Timmons & Company lobbyist, Ginger Loper. Another, Anna Sagely, lobbies for Hoffman LaRoche. And Amy Swonger lobbies for Ernst & Young, which includes Aetna and Johnson & Johnson among its clients.

Because we’re talking about the Senate, we don’t get easily digested details about campaign contributions received until long after an event. Senators file their campaign reports once every three months, so details for the second quarter of the year won’t be available until July 15. Even then, because senators have yet to pass a law requiring they file their records electronically, the only way to look up contributions would be in the old fashioned cumbersome way of going page by page. (That’s why we believe the Senate should pass S. 482 and finally join the internet age.) And even then it’s often difficult to match up contributions with any one event, since they aren’t necessarily recorded for that day or even that week.

But we do learn long after the fact that Senate Finance committee members collect many millions of dollars from health care donors and from lobbyists–check out this bar chart (click here) from the Center for Responsive Politics. So it’s an awfully good bet that there were many unofficial health care “witnesses” at all those parties for Senate Finance Committee members.