Even Slovakia, a small beneficiary, is to receive €11.7 billion from 2007 to 2013.
However, even the short-run response may be small if beneficiaries fear that they cannot return to their old DI contracts after two years.
One other issue is that, in each phase, for a small share of beneficiaries (about 4.7percentt in each phase) the state of residence for the beneficiary obtained from the TRF was not among the states included in the phase's rollout (Table 1).
Programs intended to steer people with more moderate disabilities back into jobs have managed to take only a small sliver of beneficiaries off the Social Security rolls.
House Republicans said they would try to overcome the insurance industry's objections by having the government pick up most of the cost for a small number of beneficiaries with high drug expenses.
Under the House Republican plan, the main subsidy would be indirect: the government would pay most of the costs for a small number of beneficiaries with the highest drug expenses, so insurers could charge lower premiums to everyone else.
In demand-constrained periods like the present, it weakens consumer spending and growth because the small share of beneficiaries of what growth there is have lower consumption propensities than everybody else.
One supporter, Nina Plaushin, vice president for federal affairs of ITC Holdings Corp., a Michigan-based transmission company, said: "What we have seen in some regions in the past are attempts to assign costs for new transmission to a small set of beneficiaries, because it's politically palatable.
The beneficiaries: small businesses.
"If this occurs," says Brown, "HMO revenues will go down, and they'll have to decide whether to take it out of profits or start charging beneficiaries small premiums".
14As noted earlier, because a small sample of beneficiaries are residents of "out-of-phase" states, each of which is treated as a cluster, it is conceivable that they might be substantially influencing the results of the joint tests of statistical equivalence.
