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Immigration

Immigration Reform Provides Economic Benefits For States Represented By Anti-Immigrant Lawmakers

By Esther Yu-Hsi Lee on May 17, 2013 at 3:55 pm

(Credit: AP)

A new study released by the Center for American Progress contends that a pathway to legalization and citizenship will bring vast economic benefits to states. The study by Robert Lynch and Patrick Oakford highlights the importance of a legalization pathway that would positively affect economic gains for the 24 states in which 88 percent of undocumented immigrants reside.

Once they attain legal status, immigrants will be able to contribute to the increased consumption of goods and services that boosts business sales and raises the earnings of all Americans. They will pay taxes on their higher wages and increase the gross state product (GSP). Additionally, immigrants will be able to use their new legal status by integrating their skill set and education into creating jobs and raising productivity.

Opponents of a pathway to citizenship have offered numerous “poison pill” amendments that could undermine reform and jeopardize passage of the bipartisan bill making its way through the senate. The House of Representatives has a number of lawmakers working against it, as well. Here are several of the states that would benefit from legalization, which are represented by vocal opponents or Republican leaders:

Arizona: Gov. Jan Brewer

– Undocumented immigrant population: 400,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $23,100,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $15,300,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 3,400

Pennsylvania: Rep. Lou Barletta

– Undocumented immigrant population: 160,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $14,800,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $9,300,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 2,100

Texas: Sens. John Cornyn, Ted Cruz

– Undocumented immigrant population: 1,600,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $144,600,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $74,700,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 21,000

Utah: Sen. Mike Lee

– Undocumented immigrant population: 110,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $8,600,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $4,600,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 1,200

Nationally, immigration reform will generate $832 billion in GDP, create 121,000 new jobs, and increase the personal income of all Americans by $470 billion, the report finds. Americans stand to gain more from immigration reform since immigrants could pay upwards of $184 million in tax revenue.

Health

Three Problems Contributing To Americans’ Sky High Medical Bills — And Three Ways To Fix Them

By Sy Mukherjee on Feb 21, 2013 at 3:32 pm

This week’s issue of Time Magazine takes a deep dive into Americans’ medical bills and the roots of the U.S. health care industry’s rampant inflation — costs that force one in four American seniors into bankruptcy and over one in three Americans to forgo care.

The investigative piece highlights the exorbitant costs of the most commonplace procedures and medications, and how insurance coverage often falls through for Americans who encounter unaffordable out-of-pocket costs due to the rising price of health care technology and services. Furthermore, it is often impossible for patients to ascertain why they are being charged what they are for care — a pricing opacity that is truly unique to the service-centered health care industry. Here are the three biggest takeaways from the Time exposé on the unsustainable foundations of American health care costs — and some ideas for shifting the U.S. medical landscape towards a more equitable system:

COST PROBLEM HOW TO FIX IT
The indefensible costs of medical testing, technology, and drugs. Much of the report focuses on the costs of receiving basic care and testing, such as diabetes tests, drawing blood samples, or even taking plain old Tylenol — which one hospital in the report marked up to $1.50 per pill, approximately 100 times its general market price, for a cancer patient. Hospitals are largely able to get away with this because they are, as the article puts it, “sellers in what is the ultimate seller’s market,” so device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains — even technically “nonprofit” ones — are free to run up the tabs on Americans’ care. Use market competition and price negotiations to lower costs. In its Senior Protection Plan, the Center for American Progress (CAP) advocates tying relatively low Medicare drug rebates to more generous Medicaid drug rebates, and enforcing competitive bidding for all health care products in both the public and private sectors, as well as intrastate price negotiations in the private medical sector that constrains annual spending to a predesignated cap. All told, such reforms would reduce American health care spending by at least $180 billion.
People usually don’t know why they get charged what they do for care. It’s a common mantra among health care reform advocates — America doesn’t have a health care system, it has a sick care system. Services are charged after the fact, often in the form a hefty, inscrutable bill that tells patients very little about why they are being asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars in order to receive care that can mean the difference between life and death. This opacity allows providers to get away with jacking up the price of services even as medical technology makes huge strides — which should theoretically lower costs. One GAO report states that “the lack of price transparency and the substantial variation in amounts hospitals pay for some IMD [implantable medical devices] raise questions about whether hospitals are achieving the best prices possible.” Make hospitals issue easily understandable receipts for all health care services.This is a relatively simple fix that would help facilitate further cost reductions by rooting price negotiations in easily-available, verifiable, and uniform data. As the CAP health policy team’s Topher Spiro states in an email to ThinkProgress, “We propose full price transparency—so it wouldn’t take a seven month investigation by a reporter to find out what prices are being charged.” The best possible outcome would be for hospitals and insurers to provide a comprehensive list of services to all patients and beneficiaries that let Americans know exactly how much a particular disease treatment or procedure will cost them.
Americans get care at expensive hospital chains that don’t necessarily provide the best service. As Time’s article points out, national and multi-national hospital chains rule the American medical industry — but that doesn’t mean they provide the cheapest, highest quality, or most efficient care. For instance, at the Texas giant MD Anderson, hospital administrators charged Sean Recchi over ten times as much for a chest x-ray as they would have been reimbursed by Medicare, which is required by law to approximate the price of services rendered. Why? Because Sean Recchi had subpar private insurance, and MD Anderson could get away with it. Encourage patients to visit high-performing hospitals with insurance incentives. Americans might believe that such hospitals are their only recourse — but that doesn’t have to be true. One approach to encouraging providers to provide more efficient, quality, and affordable care would be the creation of tiered insurance plans that reward patients — through lower premiums and deductibles — who use low-cost, high-quality hospitals for their care instead of the highest-cost brand name hospitals.

Health

How To Cut Health Care Spending Without Harming Benefits

By Sy Mukherjee on Nov 19, 2012 at 5:50 pm

Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report titled “The Senior Protection Plan” that outlined serious ways to cut U.S. health care spending without shifting the burden onto sick, poor, and elderly Americans. This past weekend, a misleading editorial in the Minot Daily News falsely claimed that such a proposal would lower seniors’ care quality and raid the Medicare entitlement.

But the claims about the Senior Protection Plan’s allegedly negative effect on seniors’ health coverage don’t consider the fact that many conservative Medicare “reform” plans would actually cripple the safety-net program by turning it into a voucher system and shifting costs squarely onto seniors’ premiums. Here’s what the Minot Daily News got wrong about the Senior Protection Plan:

1) “President Barack Obama’s health care law will slash $716 billion in funding for the Medicare program.” This was one of the 2012 presidential campaign’s most repeated lies, but it was untrue then, and it is untrue now. Obamacare does not “cut” Medicare funding — in fact, it slows the growth of Medicare spending by eliminating wasteful overpayments to private insurers, incentivizing better performance by providers, and cracking down on fraud and abuse in the Medicare system. These reductions will actually result in Medicare being solvent for an additional eight years, as well as more affordable care for seniors.

2) “[Obamacare] and the federal-state Medicaid system were not targeted by the CAP for cuts to help lessen the seemingly ever-expanding United States spending deficit.” The CAP plan specifically calls for $10 billion in savings from Medicaid. But unlike conservative proposals to throttle federal spending on the program and throw millions of low-income Americans off their insurance rolls, the Senior Protection Plan encourages savings by making sure that Medicaid does not have to overpay relative to third-party insurers and decreasing future payments to safety-net hospitals that will become unnecessary as more states implement Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. CAP also does not score multiple proposals in its plan — such as better care coordination and case management between Medicare and Medicaid, bundled payments, and competitive bidding — that have the potential to further reduce medical spending while simultaneously improving care quality.

3) “The CAP insists the only Medicare cuts would be in reimbursements to health care providers. Give us a break. That would lessen the quality of care for senior citizens. And the CAP plan calls for very real cuts in funding for Medicare beneficiaries, too.” The Senior Protection Plan is centered precisely on the belief that American seniors should not have to sacrifice their benefits in exchange for nominally reducing the deficit. This is in stark contrast to conservative proposals that aim to voucherize Medicare, transforming it from a “defined benefit” program into a “defined contribution” program without actually stemming the long-term upward trend in health care spending. Much of CAP’s proposed $385 billion in savings result from requiring drug companies to pay higher rebates for medications prescribed to “dual eligible” seniors who are on both Medicare and Medicaid. Furthermore, its proposed reductions to providers are precisely that — reductions in historical overpayments for certain type of care facilities and services — and the plan may actually result in significantly higher savings by moving towards more consumer-friendly, efficient practices such as prospective bundled payments, pay-for-performance measures, competitive bidding, and fraud prevention.

All told, the Senior Protection Plan is a serious proposal to reduce national health spending by addressing the actual factors driving costs — overpayments to providers and pharmaceutical companies, a poorly-coordinated system of care management, and inefficient modes of care delivery — rather than balancing the budget on the backs of sick, elderly, and poor Americans without even addressing the concerning trajectory of U.S. health care costs. By transforming the health care payment and delivery structure to be more logical and efficient, CAP’s proposal would lead to genuine savings by actually improving the way American health care works — without pushing costs onto Americans.

Health

STUDY: How To Cut $385 Billion In Health Spending Without Hurting Elderly And Low-Income Americans

By Sy Mukherjee on Nov 14, 2012 at 4:00 pm

The Center for American Progress (CAP) on Wednesday released a proposal that would cut $385 billion from U.S. health care expenditures without shifting the burden of costs onto America’s seniors and the middle class.

Dubbed “The Senior Protection Plan,” the proposal was unveiled in the face of impending budget negotiations between President Obama and Congressional leaders that will have enormous consequences for the federal safety net, particularly Medicare and Medicaid. While Obamacare has already made significant cuts to health spending, patient advocacy and provider groups have expressed concerns that a forthcoming “grand bargain” aimed at further reducing the federal budget deficit might be brokered on the backs of poor, elderly, and sick Americans.

Instead of instituting cuts that would only nominally reduce health care spending by cutting Americans’ health benefits and raising their premiums and out-of-pocket costs — as Republican proposals to slash Medicaid funding and turn Medicare into a voucher program would do — CAP’s plan hones in on the systemic factors that drive long-term medical inflation. Here are five proposals from the Senior Protection Plan aimed at cutting national health costs in a fair manner while improving the efficiency and quality of health care delivery to elderly and low-income Americans:

1) Reduce low-income Americans’ prescription drug costs. Drug manufacturers pay significantly lower rebates for drugs provided to Medicare beneficiaries than they do for drugs provided to Medicaid beneficiaries. This has led to drug companies shifting prescription drug coverage for so-called “dual eligibles” — particularly sick and poor Americans who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid — from the Medicaid program into the Medicare prescription drug plan, allowing the companies to reap massive profits without providing these vulnerable Americans any tangible benefit. The Senior Protection Plan would extend the higher Medicaid prescription drug rebates to brand-name medications purchased by dual eligible, low-income Medicare beneficiaries, leading to more affordable drug coverage for the poorest Americans as well as significant cost savings in the lucrative drug industry. Altogether, these proposals would reduce spending by $160 billion.

2) Curb waste and excessive payments to Medicare providers. The plan calls for an additional $88.6 billion in savings by bringing Medicare reimbursement rates in line with the actual costs of care while rooting out fraud and administrative waste in the program. Skilled nursing facilities, rural hospitals, and home health providers currently receive as much as $33 billion in excess payments, while Medicare overpays hospitals for inpatient services that are no more complex or time-consuming than less costly outpatient procedures. While the Obama Administration has been aggressive in cracking down on fraud in Medicare, the Senior Protection Plan finds even more savings by asking providers and caregivers to share eligibility, claims, and benefits information electronically, while aggressively pursuing perpetrators of Medicare billing fraud.

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Politics

CAP Mourns The Passing Of Marion Sandler

By John Podesta, Guest Blogger on Jun 2, 2012 at 2:20 pm

Marion Sandler

Marion Sandler, one of the first and longest-serving female CEOs of a Fortune 500 company and Founding Director of the Center for American Progress, passed away last night. Sandler was a dear friend of the Center, a pioneering woman in finance, a coach and conscience for progressive organizations, and a tough-minded woman of enormous decency who tried to make government and business more responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans.

In each station of her life –from Maine where she was raised, to New York where she was a path-breaking woman in the financial world and met Herb Sandler, to many years in California where they built and ran a highly regarded business and raised a beautiful family together – Marion Sandler lived the American dream.  
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LGBT

For Businesses, Anti-LGBT Discrimination Adds To Costs, But Fairness Adds To Profits

By Guest Blogger on Mar 22, 2012 at 12:36 pm

Our guest blogger is Crosby Burns, Research Associate for LGBT Progress.

Check out the report's infographic on the costs of workplace discrimination.

Discrimination is an unfortunate reality for many of our nation’s LGBT workers. Recent research and data show us that 42 percent of LGB workers and an astonishing 90 percent of transgender workers have experienced some form of discrimination on the job. Congress must pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to give these workers uniform and comprehensive protections against unfair and unjust workplace discrimination.

Until then, far too many gay and transgender workers will be forced into the ranks of the unemployed at a time when all families are struggling to stay afloat. But discrimination is not only a problem for gay and transgender workers. Workplace discrimination also imposes significant financial harm on businesses, introducing inefficiencies and costs that cut into profits and undermine the bottom line.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) documents these inefficiencies and costs in its groundbreaking new report entitled, “The Costly Business of Discrimination: The Economic Costs of Discrimination and the Financial Benefits of LGBT Equality in the workplace.” This report examines five core ways in which discrimination imposes significant financial harm on businesses:

  • RECRUITMENT: When employers hire individuals based on job-irrelevant characteristics such as sexual orientation and gender identity, businesses are left with a substandard workforce that diminishes their ability to generate healthy profits.
  • RETENTION: Discrimination forces otherwise qualified gay and transgender employees out of a job and into the ranks of the unemployed and introduces numerous turnover-related costs. According to a recent study, to replace a departing employee costs somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 for an hourly worker, and between $75,000 and $211,000 for an executive making $100,000 a year.
  • JOB PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY: Sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace needlessly compromise maximum labor productivity and workforce output. Moreover, it introduces unnecessary costs by increasing absenteeism, lowering productivity, and fostering a less motivated, less entrepreneurial, and less committed workforce.
  • MARKETING TO CONSUMERS: When companies discriminate and allow unfairness to go unchecked in the workplace, consumers increasingly react by actively choosing to do business elsewhere.
  • LITIGATION: Businesses are increasingly liable for discrimination lawsuits even in states that have not outlawed gay and transgender discrimination, making discrimination economically unwise for companies in all 50 states. In 2010 the top 10 private plaintiff employment discrimination lawsuits cost firms more than $346 million.

Alternatively, the report unearths how policies that level the playing field for LGBT workers can bring a substantial amount of cash into company coffers. This is why America’s largest and most successful companies have implemented a range of policies that ensure the fair and equal treatment of LGBT workers. Of Fortune 100 companies, 93 percent have nondiscrimination policies that include sexual orientation, 74 percent for gender identity, and 86 percent provide equal partner health insurance benefits.

 

Climate Progress

Waxman Challenges Deficit Hawks To Become Climate Hawks

By Brad Johnson on Mar 19, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) said he believes a price on carbon pollution can provide a unique solution to both the country’s fiscal challenges and its looming climate crisis, uniting climate and deficit hawks. His presentation put the challenge to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House Republican budget chief, who has claimed that Congress has a “moral obligation” to reduce the country’s debt. With former Republican congressman Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD), Waxman explained how tackling climate pollution can address fiscal, energy, environmental, and economic challenges simultaneously:

A price on carbon can give you a substantial amount of money to help deal with our fiscal problems. A price on carbon can move us away from our reliance on fossil fuels which add to the greenhouse gas emissions in our climate, and by doing that we can become less dependent on oil. We would be able to be a challenger in the economic future of clean energy.

Watch it:

“Do people want to cut Medicare and Medicaid?” Waxman asked. A rising price on carbon pollution, Waxman said, could raise over $1 trillion over several decades.

Gilchrest rebuked Ryan for ignoring the climate crisis in his depiction of the “defining moment“:

Paul Ryan said this is a defining moment for future generations as far as a fiscal sense for reducing the deficit. This is a defining moment on the planet of seven billion people extracting resources faster than they can be replaced, becoming a geologic force by pumping more carbon dioxide in decades than nature is able to store in the earth over millions of years. The defining moment is realizing that the market, capitalism, our civilization is actually a subset of the earth’s ecosystem. We’re not independent of the living machine that gives us life on earth. We’re dependent on it.

“The U.S. is facing a range of unprecedented fiscal and environmental challenges,” said Waxman. “We’ve got a confluence of events happening all at once.”

Waxman and Gilchrest recently co-authored a Washington Post op-ed with Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Sherry Boehlert (R-MD) calling for climate-change policies to be considered for deficit reduction.

Yglesias

Everyone’s Writing About CAP

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 7, 2009 at 10:05 am

SEEPROGRESS-TheCenterForAmericanProgress259-73 1

Here’s Tom Friedman:

That is why I was heartened to see the liberal Center for American Progress stating last week that, while the stimulus is vital to rescuing our economy, the size of projected budget deficits demand that we also start thinking about broad-based tax increases and reductions in some spending and entitlement programs supported by liberals.

And here’s Marc Ambinder:

Among the D[emocracy] A[alliance]‘s success stories: it has contributed to CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has used its money to harass Democrats and Republicans with ethics issues and whose investigation of contractors in Afghanistan have led to a review of State Department policies. Media Matters, a liberal press watchdog group, is bigger today than it was before the election. DA also helped fund the Center for American Progress, the uber-progressive think and action tank. Membership costs $55,000 for the first year and at least $30,000 per year after that.

And Michelle Malkin:

CAP is a lead organization in the Health Care for America Now coalition, the so-called “grassroots” lobbying group for Obama’s health care takeover legislation run out of 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C., with a $40 million budget. CAP is also the parent group of Think Progress, the far-left website leading the smear campaign against fiscally conservative activists who protested at congressional town halls this summer. And several CAP alumni are now leading the Obamacare push at the Department of Health and Human Services, including special HHS assistant Michael Halle and HHS Director Jeanne Lambrew, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked on health policy in the Clinton administration.

Apparently Halle was a CAP intern in 2007. So you can see everyone should apply to the program, since it’s apparently a one-way ticket to running the country.

Yglesias

A “‘Heritage of the Left’ of the Right”

By Matthew Yglesias on May 27, 2009 at 9:13 am

wr20090525-21gop-cx

The political system enters a period of infinite regress:

In the wake of another chastening set of GOP defeats at the polls, Holtz-Eakin is now setting out to address those problems head-on. He’s developing a proposal for a new think tank that he describes as a “Center for American Progress for the right” — a reference to the liberal think tank that has supplied staff and policy proposals to the Obama administration and developed new ways to market its ideas. [...]

The irony, of course, is that the Center for American Progress itself was developed as a liberal answer to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has been a source of Republican policy ideas for decades. But Holtz-Eakin says established think tanks of the right, like Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute, were “not helpful” during the McCain campaign because they weren’t politically engaged or innovative in their media strategies.

That’s why Holtz-Eakin says he now looks to the Center for American Progress as a model. The center, headed by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta, combined a battery of domestic and foreign policy proposals with outreach innovations, such as hosting film screenings around the country and collecting e-mail addresses of people who sign up for the screenings.

This seems pretty misguided to me. In particular, DHE needs to think harder about the fact that there are already well-resourced conservative think tanks with plenty of capabilities. Before CAP came on the scene, there really wasn’t a “Heritage of the left.” On the right, Heritage and AEI already exist. The problem they face is that the conservative movement, as presently constituted, is not prepared to accept anything other than “tax cuts” as a solution to anything. Consequently, they’re not really even prepared to accept the premise that other problems exist. Tax cuts can’t solve climate change, so there must be no such thing! Tax cuts can’t curb inequality, so there must not be a problem with growing inequality.

If you’re a white guy looking to vent about how Puerto Rican women growing up poor in the Bronx get unfair advantages in life, the conservative movement has a lot to offer you. But otherwise there’s nothing there policywise. That’s not, however, because there are no organizations out there capable of developing or marketing policy. It’s because the movement has become unremittingly hostile to constructive policymaking. Everybody’s too busy cowering in fear from Rush Limbaugh to come up with anything.

Yglesias

Jon Henke Attacks CAP/AF as “Astroturf”

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 13, 2009 at 10:57 am

astroturf.png

Speaking of astroturf organizing, Jon Henke has a curious post up accusing my ThinkProgress colleagues of hypocrisy for using the term “astroturf” in a disparaging way:

The Center for American Progress & Think Progress, of all groups, should know better than to use the word “astroturf” against funded, ideological 501c(4) organizations that are trying to organize activists. Especially considering how many funded, ideological 501c(4) organizations they have trying to organize activists.

I don’t understand how this argument is supposed to work. CAP & CAPAF aren’t astroturf outfits because we’re not pretending to be a grassroots organization. The Tea Party “movement” is a sham because it’s pretending to be a spontaneous grassroots movement. Obviously, ThinkProgress is not a spontaneous grassroots movement. It’s a hierarchical organization that describes itself as “a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund” that “seeks to provide a forum that advances progressive ideas and policies.”

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