Parties maneuvering on debt and Medicare

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The threat of a first default by the federal government is pushing President Barack Obama and Republicans toward a sweeping agreement to cut government spending and increase the Treasury’s borrowing authority. Yet a perennial partisan struggle over Medicare drives them apart.

Remarkably, the two sides seem determined to pursue both accord and discord simultaneously, sparing the still-wobbling economy from threatened calamity while preserving Medicare as a political issue in the 2012 elections.

“I’m willing. I’m ready. It is time to have the conversation” about deficit cuts and the debt limit, said House Speaker John Boehner, urging Obama to become personally involved. “It is time to play large ball, not small ball.”

But a few days later, House Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California said, “I could never support any arrangement that reduced benefits for Medicare. Absolutely not,” she told CBS’ “Face The Nation,” emphasizing a position she and other Democrats had laid out at their own meeting with Obama.

Given the sheer size of Medicare, nearly $500 billion a year, any deal on reducing future deficits likely is to include savings from the program, if not the benefit cuts many Democrats oppose.

But if any Republican thought that the White House and congressional Democrats might agree to even a temporary cease-fire on Medicare, they may want to reconsider.

Boehner, R-Ohio, and fellow House Republicans had scarcely left a White House meeting with Obama on Wednesday when presidential press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that Obama “doesn’t believe that we need to end Medicare as we know it, to dismantle the program as it currently exists, in order to achieve significant deficit reduction.”

Within seconds, he said the Republican plan for Medicare “puts too much of the burden of deficit reduction on the shoulders of seniors, of low-income children and the disabled. And the president just feels that that’s unacceptable.”

A few moments later, Carney hit a trifecta of sorts, calling the Republican plan “premium support or privatization or voucherization.”

None of these can be considered terms of endearment, politically, particularly not by Republicans. They say their Medicare plan, developed by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is designed to save the program from bankruptcy and preserve it for future generations.