The best lawmakers money can buy.

We already know that the Republicans and conservative Democrats, known as the “Blue Dogs,’’ are dead-set defenders of a status quo where 46 million Americans are uninsured. They were the first to be bought off by the $263 million in lobbying by the health sector this year, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

But will other Democrats be slowly picked off, and allow reform to be picked apart into irrelevance in the coming weeks, given that the party long ago took single-payer off the table?

Back In the 2008 election, the health sector contributed nearly $20 million to Obama’s campaign, more than twice the amount it gave to Republican John McCain. But now that the issue has come to the fore, the political action committees of the top five contributors in 2008 – the American Dental Association, the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, Pfizer, and the American Society of Anesthesiologists – have all given thousands of dollars to the Blue Dog PAC.

 I’m sure Pfizer and the AMA and are just worried about the deficit.