WASHINGTON — Senior Republicans conceded Wednesday that a deal is unlikely on a contentious plan to overhaul Medicare and offered to open budget talks with the White House by focusing on areas where both parties can agree, such as cutting farm subsidies.
On the eve of debt-reduction talks led by Vice President Joe Biden, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia said Republicans remain convinced that reining in federal retirement programs is the key to stabilizing the nation’s finances over the long term. But he said Republicans recognize they may need to look elsewhere to achieve consensus after President Barack Obama “excoriated us” for a proposal to privatize Medicare.
That search should start, Cantor said, with a GOP list of proposals that would save $715 billion over the next decade by ending payments to wealthy farmers, limiting lawsuits against doctors and expanding government auctions of broadcast spectrum to telecommunications companies, among other items.
Democrats said they were encouraged by the move, which could smooth the way to a compromise allowing Congress to raise the legal limit on government borrowing and avoid a national default.
“There’s common ground there,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, who is representing House Democrats in the Biden talks.
The conciliatory tone signals the opening of a new and more consequential phase in the battle to design an affordable government for an aging society. After months of partisan brinkmanship over comparatively small cuts to the current budget, lawmakers returned to Washington this week to confront the harder problem of reducing a national debt that has risen to alarming levels.
In the Biden talks, Cantor said House Republicans will be looking for an agreement that includes three elements: spending cuts in the 2012 budget, which covers the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1; enforceable targets that would require Congress to continue ratcheting down spending in future years; and action by the end of this year on legislation that would begin to meet those targets.
“We don’t want to rely solely on caps and targets. We want to take action now,” he said.
The biggest mandatory programs — often called “entitlements” — are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But Cantor said negotiators could avoid the “big three,” which Democrats have vowed to defend, by focusing on changes in other areas.
