June 6, 2013
In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA, or Simpson-Mazzoli) granted legal status to about three million unauthorized immigrants. As Congress attempts to once again address our broken immigration system, stakeholders on all sides of the immigration reform debate have sought to compare current proposals to the IRCA. To support an informed dialogue, BPC prepared a comparison between IRCA and the current Senate proposal, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744).
In an effort to facilitate the ongoing immigration debate, the Bipartisan Policy Center compiled the following overview of phrases, terms and information that are commonly used when discussing immigration and immigration reform. This will be a dynamic document that will grow as the debate unfolds; it should be viewed as a politically neutral, informative resource for those involved or interested in the immigration debate.
The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) recently released A Bipartisan Rx for Patient-Centered Care and System-Wide Cost Containment, which included a multitude of recommendations to spur improvement in system-wide health care quality and efficiency. This effort, led by former senators Tom Daschle, Bill Frist, Pete Domenici, and former OMB and CBO Director Dr. Alice Rivlin, focused extensively on reforms to Medicare that would result in higher quality care and reduce cost growth for beneficiaries and taxpayers. A central aim of our recommendations, which incorporate an SGR fix, is to create strong incentives for the full range of providers to transition from the volume-based payment methods that predominate in Medicare today to advanced payment and delivery models that promote accountability for quality outcomes, patient satisfaction and value.
Social Security has served as a retirement foundation for hundreds of millions of American workers ever since its creation in 1935. Today, low-income seniors – those with incomes below $20,100 – receive over 80 percent of their income from the Social Security monthly check. Even for those in the middle quintile – with incomes between $20,100 and $32,600 – over two-thirds of their monthly income is a result of Social Security. By any reasonable standard, Social Security has been the most successful antipoverty program in the nation’s history. The program currently serves over 47 million Americans, and it must continue to serve as a social safety net in the future.
Over the next 10 years, our proposals would result in approximately $560 billion in deficit reduction. Our Medicare reforms would achieve roughly $300 billion in net savings within that time frame, and over second decade (2024-2033), our proposals would result in another almost $1 trillion in budgetary savings to the Medicare program. These savings estimates are net of the cost of fixing the dysfunctional Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) physician payment formula.
New Dynamics of the U.S. Natural Gas Market
The analysis presented in this report considered the relative impact of a realistic range of supply and demand drivers that will shape future U.S. energy markets.
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