Geoff Colvin devotes his latest Fortune column to the big issues the 113th Congress should address, including reform of Medicare and the federal tax system.

Let’s get something straight: Medicare as we know it is going to end, with or without Obama or Ryan or anyone else. The question is what it will become. The wrongly labeled Ryan plan, previously known as premium support, is the most promising bipartisan proposal. Its latest version is actually the Wyden-Ryan plan, since it’s co-sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden, a liberal Democrat from Oregon. It would let seniors stay with Medicare or buy medical insurance in the open market with federally funded vouchers. Premium support was first outlined by two Democratic economists at the Brookings Institution. It was supported in 2010 by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force, chaired by former Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and former Clinton OMB chief Alice Rivlin. It’s as solidly centrist a proposal as you’ll hear.

Everyone agrees the tax code is an abomination that discourages investment and most other economic activity. The bipartisan approach to fixing it isn’t a mystery: fewer deductions, exclusions, credits, and loopholes, combined with lower rates. The Simpson-Bowles commission endorsed that formula, as did the Domenici-Rivlin task force.

Of course the devil’s in the details, but working them out is what we pay legislators to do. That’s the job at which the 112th Congress proved so spectacularly inept. If a reform package would (or even might) increase tax revenue, many Republicans couldn’t abide it. If it would lower rates on high-income taxpayers, even if it could increase their tax bills through eliminated deductions, plenty of Democrats would be unalterably opposed.

There’s no reason to suppose the 113th Congress, arriving in January, will be better than the 112th. But just maybe its members will be so panicked by an economy going nowhere and the prospect of more trillion-dollar deficits that they’ll be forced into the unthinkable: cooperating.