With failure of Super Committee, where do across the board cuts come from?

With the expected failure of the congressional Super Committee, the questions now are where are the automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion to come from?

The automatic cuts may not be so devastating on the non-defense spending side of the equation. Both Medicaid and Social Security are spared from the funding reductions and Medicare cuts are limited to 2 percent of the entitlement program’s budget.

Budget hawks looking for significant spending reductions herald the automatic cuts as real deficit-reduction. And entitlement program defenders claim the limited cuts — which include exceptions for the poor and disabled — are less damaging than any that are likely to come out of a supercommittee deal.

Under the automatic cuts, or sequestration, Medicare will lose about $123 billion between 2013 and 2021. But that entire amount will come out of the pockets of doctors and hospitals, not grandma and grandpa.

“If there’s a deal, it could be much worse,” said Eric Kingson, the co-director of Social Security Works. “I’m not going to suggest that a 2 percentage point cut focused on providers may not result in tighter payments for certain kinds of procedures, but it is far less onerous than further raising deductibles on people.”

Watch more from ABC News