Yes, people who would be allowed into the program through the lower entrance requirements. Part of that is related to first-time entrants and part of it is related to just the elimination of the variable entrance requirement.
So the specific costs that sum to $1.5 billion....
There are the best 12 weeks over a 52-week period that we estimate as $320 million per year and affecting 480,000 clients. The other two costs we've broken out.
This is a different approach from our approach in the past around lowered entrance requirements. We have a cost for the fixed entrance requirement for special and regular benefits. There are two aspects there. One aspect is lowering the special requirements from 600 to 360 hours, and the second one is lowering the variable entrance requirements, which are 420 to 700 hours, down to a flat 360 hours. For that, we come up with $665 million per year and 150,000 claimants affected.
Now I'll turn to the final aspect of the bill as proposed, which is the new re-entrance requirements.
We've actually costed that separately as well. That's associated with looking at a population of people who wouldn't have 910 hours when filing their claim right now and who, at the present time, wouldn't have 490 hours in their prior year of work. That's the way the new entrance requirement works, if you don't have a certain level at the time you file your claim, and you have to have a certain amount of work in the previous year. This is an additional element of work that we've undertaken. It's very complex to estimate, so we've broken that out from the work that we've done prior and estimated that as well. That comes to $535 million per year and our estimate is it would affect 100,000 claimants.
That's how we come to $1.5 billion for the bill unamended.
On the proposed amendments that have been circulated, we do have costing for those as well, and they would significantly change the various costs in the bill.