WASHINGTON — Conservative senators are urging the debt-cutting supercommittee to raise the eligibility age for Medicare and to require many retirees to pay more. The top Senate Republican on defense is endorsing some of President Barack Obama’s proposed benefit curbs for the military. Even farm-state lawmakers are offering cuts to agriculture subsidies and food programs.
Friday’s deadline for lawmakers to offer ideas to Congress’ bipartisan 12-member panel brought out a flood of advice. Some lawmakers offered up sacred cows. Others just restated political talking points.
Whether it will help the supercommittee make actual progress remains to be seen.
What appears clear is that the fundamental disputes remain the same: Democrats and Republicans remain at loggerheads on taxes and proposals to cut benefit programs such as Medicare.
Republicans are, so far, standing fast against tax increases. Democrats won’t touch Medicare without them.
It is not at all certain that the panel, due to act by Nov. 23, will find success in reaching its goal of generating at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings over the coming decade. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that it won’t.
“It’s impossible to do it in the next month,” said Joseph Minarik, research director for the private, business-led Committee for Economic Development, citing the technical complexities of crafting such a measure as well as the political challenges of enacting it. “Deficit reduction is doing things you don’t want to do. The political pressures are awful.”
Panel members, too, are hedging their bets. “Whether we’re able to overcome some of the obstacles is still unclear,” panel member Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told a Washington audience Friday.
Even bipartisanship won’t head off tussles with some powerful interest groups. A major battle is brewing over whether to make military service members pay more for their health care and to make military pensions less generous for future enlistees.
In separate letters, Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain, chairman and top Republican, respectively, on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the panel should consider the administration’s proposed cost curbs on military health benefits and pensions.
Proposals for trims
Proposals made to the debt-cutting supercommittee:
Medicare: Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee recommend raising the Medicare retirement age for future beneficiaries and shifting costs to current retirees by reworking deductibles and copayments. They also suggest raising premiums for high-income retirees and tightening the screws on providers such as hospitals and nursing homes.
Pay freeze: The Democratic chairman and top Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee proposed, “with regret,” extending the freeze on federal civilian workers’ salaries for another year for $32 billion in 10-year savings, boosting the contribution that civil servants must make to their pensions and curbing the government’s use of private contractors by 15 percent.
