Budget Fight Looming on Medicare and Governmnet's Size

The plan, which is scheduled to be unveiled Tuesday, will be the most ambitious Republican hard work since the November elections to put a conservative stamp on economic and domestic policyowner. It involves far greater stakes for Congress and for President Obama substantively and politically than the current fight over spending cuts.

WASHINGTON - Congress has yet to settle its first budget fight of the year but is already about to move on to an even more consequential fiscal clash. Even as the four parties struggled over the weekend to reach a deal on federal spending for the next five months and avert a government shutdown at the finish of the week, House Republicans were finishing a budget proposal for next year and beyond. It is likely to spur an ideological showdown over the size of government and the role of entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

The longer-term budget proposal has been led by Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who is the party's leading voice on budget matters, and will go beyond numbers to provide policyowner prescriptions.

The finish result of that fight was still uncertain on Saturday as Congressional staff members assembled new proposals and the White House said that Mr. Obama had called House Speaker John A. Boehner and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, to urge them to find an appropriate compromise. They reminded them that time is jogging short.

It will demand deep spending cuts again in 2012, chart a path to reducing the deficit and slowing the growth of the accumulating national debt, and grapple with the politically volatile issue of reining in the cost of entitlement programs, beginning with Medicaid, which provides health coverage for the poor.

We need to get spending and debt under control, and they would like to get the economy growing, and they would like to address the giant drivers of our debt, and that is the entitlement programs, Mr. Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, said in an interview. We have an ethical obligation to the country to do this.

House Democrats, who are preparing an alternative budget, say the Republican approach would cut off aid to some of the neediest Americans and shortchange schooling programs vital to staying economically competitive.

The efforts of Mr. Ryan, backed by Mr. Boehner and other Republican leaders, are definite to meet serious resistance from the Democratic-led Senate and from Mr. Obama. In plenty of respects, the disagreeable fight over financing the government for the next five months has been a warm-up for the longer-term budget battle, which could be further inflamed by a debate over raising the federal debt limit.

How you get your deficit reduction is important,Mr. Van Hollen added.

It appears to be the same elderly, same elderly,said Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee. It is going to be continued giant tax breaks for millionaires and giant corporate special interests like oil companies and deep cuts in schooling for children and health take care of seniors.

Republicans have been urging Mr. Obama to seize the chance provided by a divided government and lead a legislative push to rein in spending on programs like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Emboldened by their election wins as well as a sense that the public is prepared for a new approach, House Republicans say they will push forward on their own and try to draw the president and Senate Democrats in to a broader discussion about long-term deficit reduction and the soaring costs of the entitlement programs.

Details of the House budget are being tightly held. But lawmakers and other officials predict serious proposals to alter Medicaid and Medicare, with talks continuing about how hard to push for adjustments in Social Security.

You are going to see major reforms in Medicare and Medicaid; you are going to see a alter in the deficit trajectory that is dramatic, said Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who is on the Budget Committee.

Ryan isn't touching the third rail,Mr. Cole said, employing the expression used to recommend that messing with Social Security and Medicare can be politically deadly. He is wrapping both hands around it.

The budget for 2012 and beyond could heighten the partisan tensions surrounding the financing debate for the current year. If Congress cannot settle that issue by Friday, authorization for some government spending will die and parts of the federal government will be shutdown.

Some Republicans had desired to delay putting forward Mr. Ryans plan until this year's negotiations were done. They were worried that introducing another set of proposals might confuse the debate and give Democrats four targets to exploit in their hard work to persuade voters that Republicans were going far in slashing programs.

Others argued that the Ryan proposal could help Mr. Boehner collect the Republican votes they needs to receive a compromise on 2011 spending through the House. Any deal for the current fiscal year is likely to fall short of what the Tea Party movement and some other fiscal conservatives are demanding, but Republican leaders are already signaling that the giant prize is a deep spending cut for next year as well as a start on reining in the entitlement programs  steps that could involve trillions of dollars over coming decades, as against the tens of billions of dollars on the table in the budget battle for this year.

While Mr. Ryan and top Republican aides would not discuss specifics, there's strong indications that the proposal will draw on deficit reduction designs that Mr. Ryan laid out in his 2010 roadmap plan as well as a second proposal they wrote with Alice M. Rivlin, a director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration.