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This report provides information related to health insurance. The content includes what it is, why is it needed, health insurance regulation, and how are private health benefits delivered and financed.

This report outlines the agency’s organization, project development process, civil works appropriations, and evolution of its responsibilities.

In September 2003, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a proposed bulletin on “Peer Review and Information Quality” in the Federal Register that sought to establish a process by which all “significant regulatory information” would be peer reviewed. The scope of the proposed bulletin was very broad,

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) provides farmers with financial and technical assistance to plan and implement soil and water conservation practices. EQIP was enacted in 1996 and most recently amended by the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (Section 2301 of P.L. 107-171). It is a mandatory spending program (i.e., not subject to annual appropriations), administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). EQIP is guaranteed a total of $6.1 billion from FY2002 through FY2007 from the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), making it the largest conservation cost-sharing program.

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Social Security is the foundation of the nation's retirement income system, helping to protect the vast majority of American workers and their families from poverty in old age. However, it is much more than a retirement program and also provides millions of Americans with disability insurance and survivors' benefits. Over the long term, as the baby boom generation retires and as Americans continue to live longer and have fewer children, Social Security's financing shortfall presents a major program solvency and sustainability challenge that is growing as time passes. The Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging asked GAO to discuss the future of the Social Security program. This testimony will address the nature of Social Security's long-term financing problem and why it is preferable for Congress to take action sooner rather than later, as well as the broader context in which reform proposals should be considered."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has faced persistent challenges for many years in managing its grants, which constitute over one-half of the agency's budget, or about $4 billion annually. Among other things, EPA has been criticized for not always promoting competition in awarding grants, including not completely and accurately announcing grant opportunities to the public and potential applicants. One avenue EPA uses to inform the public about grant opportunities is the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA), the federal government's listing of available grants and other federal funding opportunities. EPA's Office of Grants and Debarment (OGD), among other things, develops grants policy and guidance and compiles grant information for the CFDA. OGD has taken several steps to address criticism regarding the lack of complete and accurate information in the CFDA. In this context the Chairman, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, asked us to determine whether EPA is providing complete and accurate information on grant opportunities to the public in the CFDA."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO agreed to assist Congress in evaluating the extent to which the Schedules of Receipts, Disbursements, and Fund Balance for five Interparliamentary Groups appropriately reflect the actual cash receipts and disbursements and related fund balances for the years ended December 31, 2002, and 2001. These five groups were the Mexico-United States Interparliamentary Group, Canada-United States Interparliamentary Group, Transatlantic Legislators' Dialogue, United States Group of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and British-American Parliamentary Group. Congress asked us to (1) compare recorded receipts to appropriation requests, bank statements, and other supporting documentation; (2) compare recorded disbursements to vouchers, canceled checks, and other supporting documentation; and (3) recalculate and compare fund balance with amounts recorded in the general journal and Schedule of Receipts, Disbursements, and Fund Balance for 2002 and 2001. We were not engaged to perform, and did not perform, an examination, the objective of which would have been to express an opinion on the amounts reported on the schedules. Accordingly, we do not express such an opinion. Had we performed additional procedures, other matters might have come to our attention that we would have reported them."

Inorganic membrane reactors offer the possibility of combining reaction and separation in a single operation at high temperatures to overcome the equilibrium limitations experienced in conventional reactor configurations. Such attractive features can be advantageously utilized in a number of potential commercial opportunities, which include dehydrogenation, hydrogenation, oxidative dehydrogenation, oxidation and catalytic decomposition reactions. However, to be cost effective, significant technological advances and improvements will be required to solve several key issues which include: (a) permselective thin solid film, (b) thermal, chemical and mechanical stability of the film at high temperatures, and (c) reactor engineering and module development in relation to the development of effective seals at high temperature and high pressure. In this project, we are working on the development and application of palladium and palladium-silver alloy thin-film composite membranes in membrane reactor-separator configuration for simultaneous production and separation of hydrogen and carbon dioxide at high temperature. From our research on Pd-composite membrane, we have demonstrated that the new membrane has significantly higher hydrogen flux with very high perm-selectivity than any of the membranes commercially available. The steam reforming of methane by equilibrium shift in Pd-composite membrane reactor is being studied to demonstrate the potential application of this new development. …

The Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA) placed a three-year moratorium on the ability of state and local governments to (1) impose new taxes on Internet access or (2) impose any multiple or discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce. The act grandfathered the state and local access taxes that were “... generally imposed and actually enforced prior to October 1, 1998 ....” This report discusses issues of state and local taxation of Internet transactions because commerce conducted by parties in different states over the Internet.

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This report reviews the public record concerning federal continuity of government arrangements. It will be updated to reflect significant developments.

This report reviews the historical context which forms the background for renewed consideration of consumer reform legislation, including a review of the current law and a survey of selected issues that have been the focus of legislative debate in the part, such as the scope of the homeland exemption, nondischargeability for liability current by violent activity, and the protection of child support payments.

This report discusses the effect of provisions like the Clinger-Cohen Act and the Homeland Security Act of 2002 on Information Technology (IT) management. It compares the effects of these acts on IT and potential issues are brought the forefront, with appropriate congressional action due.

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The deep-sea gorgonian coral Primnoa spp. lives in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at depths of 65-3200 m. This coral has an arborescent growth form with a skeletal axis composed of annual rings made from calcite and gorgonin. It has a lifespan of at least several hundred years. It has been suggested that isotopic profiles from the gorgonin fraction of the skeleton could be used to reconstruct long-term, annual-scale variations in surface productivity. We tested assumptions about the trophic level, intra-colony isotopic reproducibility, and preservation of isotopic signatures in a suite of modern and fossil specimens. Measurements of gorgonin {Delta}{sup 14}C and {delta}{sup 15}N indicate that Primnoa spp. feed mainly on zooplankton and/or sinking particulate organic matter (POM{sub SINK}), and not on suspended POM (POM{sub SUSP}) or dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Gorgonin {delta}{sup 13}C and {delta}{sup 15}N in specimens from NE Pacific shelf waters, NW Atlantic slope waters, the Sea of Japan, and a South Pacific (Southern Ocean sector) seamount were strongly correlated with Levitus 1994 surface apparent oxygen utilization (AOU; the best available measure of surface productivity), demonstrating coupling between skeletal isotopic ratios and biophysical processes in surface water. Time-series isotopic profiles from different sections along the same colony …

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We report here the BRAHMS measurements of particle production in d+Au and p+p collisions at RHIC. The results presented here are compared to previous p+A measurements at lower energies in fixed target mode. Some preliminary results on abundances of identified particles at high rapidity are also presented.

The purpose of this Workshop on ''Functional Requirements for the Modeling of Fate and Transport of Waterborne CBRN Materials'' was to solicit functional requirements for tools that help Incident Managers plan for and deal with the consequences of industrial or terrorist releases of materials into the nation's waterways and public water utilities. Twenty representatives attended and several made presentations. Several hours of discussions elicited a set of requirements. These requirements were summarized in a form for the attendees to vote on their highest priority requirements. These votes were used to determine the prioritized requirements that are reported in this paper and can be used to direct future developments.

Better to understand the status of fusion research in the year 2003 we will first put the research in its historical context. Fusion power research, now beginning its sixth decade of continuous effort, is unique in the field of scientific research. Unique in its mixture of pure and applied research, unique in its long-term goal and its promise for the future, and unique in the degree that it has been guided and constrained by national and international governmental policy. Though fusion research's goal has from the start been precisely defined, namely, to obtain a net release of energy from controlled nuclear fusion reactions between light isotopes (in particular those of hydrogen and helium) the difficulty of the problem has spawned in the past a very wide variety of approaches to the problem. Some of these approaches have had massive international support for decades, some have been pursued only at a ''shoestring'' level by dedicated groups in small research laboratories or universities. In discussing the historical and present status of fusion research the implications of there being two distinctly different approaches to achieving net fusion power should be pointed out. The first, and oldest, approach is the use of strong magnetic …

Siloxanes have a wide variety of applications throughout the aerospace industry which take advantage of their exceptional insulating and adhesive properties and general resilience. They also offer a wide range of tailorable engineering properties with changes in composition and filler content. They are, however, subject to degradation in radiatively and thermally harsh environments. We are using solid state nuclear magnetic resonance techniques to investigate changes in network and interfacial structure in siloxane elastomers and their correlations to changes in engineering performance in a series of degraded materials. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) parameters such as transverse (T{sub 2}) relaxation times, cross relaxation rates, and residual dipolar coupling constants provide excellent probes of changes crosslink density and motional dynamics of the polymers caused by multi-mechanism degradation. The results of NMR studies on aged siloxanes are being used in conjunction with other mechanical tests to provide insight into component failure and degradation kinetics necessary for preliminary lifetime assessments of these materials as well as into the structure-property relationships of the polymers. NMR and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) results obtained both from high resolution NMR spectrometers as well as low resolution benchtop NMR screening tools will be presented.

This report details the research and findings generated over the course of a 3-year research project funded by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD). Originally tasked with studying beryllium chemistry and chelation for the treatment of Chronic Beryllium Disease and environmental remediation of beryllium-contaminated environments, this work has yielded results in beryllium and uranium solubility and speciation associated with toxicology; specific and effective chelation agents for beryllium, capable of lowering beryllium tissue burden and increasing urinary excretion in mice, and dissolution of beryllium contamination at LLNL Site 300; {sup 9}Be NMR studies previously unstudied at LLNL; secondary ionization mass spec (SIMS) imaging of beryllium in spleen and lung tissue; beryllium interactions with aerogel/GAC material for environmental cleanup. The results show that chelator development using modern chemical techniques such as chemical thermodynamic modeling, was successful in identifying and utilizing tried and tested beryllium chelators for use in medical and environmental scenarios. Additionally, a study of uranium speciation in simulated biological fluids identified uranium species present in urine, gastric juice, pancreatic fluid, airway surface fluid, simulated lung fluid, bile, saliva, plasma, interstitial fluid and intracellular fluid.

We have recently completed a large-area, coded-aperture, gamma-ray imager for use in searching for radiation sources. The instrument was constructed to verify that weak point sources can be detected at considerable distances if one uses imaging to overcome fluctuations in the natural background. The instrument uses a rank-19, one-dimensional coded aperture to cast shadow patterns onto a 0.57 m{sup 2} NaI(Tl) detector composed of 57 individual cubes each 10 cm on a side. These are arranged in a 19 x 3 array. The mask is composed of four-centimeter thick, one-meter high, 10-cm wide lead blocks. The instrument is mounted in the back of a small truck from which images are obtained as one drives through a region.