The budget passed Friday by the state House of Representatives and now awaiting the signature of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy makes no one feel good.

A spending increase pared down to 0.4 percent will pain most people in a variety of ways and truly hurt others. It was as unwelcome as major surgery, but like surgery, this plan may help Connecticut heal from many years of fiscal malaise.

Coming to grips with the current and looming billion-dollar deficits had to be done. The next task, just as urgent, is to restructure the way Connecticut budgets and spends.

The House of Representatives passed the $19.76 billion budget on a 74-70 vote, with eight Democrats joining the Republicans in opposition. The Senate Democratic majority had passed it Thursday by a vote of 21-15.

The budget contains no new taxes and does not tap funding reserves. It is expected to eliminate a $960 million projected deficit this year, but it depends, among other things, on the governor finding $200 million more in savings that will inevitably affect the state employee workforce. Education at all levels loses big. Wise municipal goverments that hesitated to budget for promised revenues were right.

The party-line voting could never be called bipartisanship, and the losers found plenty to criticize. But the governor, the Democrats who voted for the budget, and the Republicans and Democrats opposed have accomplished the first step in addressing a deep-seated dysfunction: admitting things can't go on as they have.

All sides are using the buzz phrase "structural change," by which they mean different approaches but a shared sense that inertia won't do.

Having made the deep cuts on deadline and with few options, the governor and the General Assembly should be looking for nothing less than 21st-century revisions to old ways of funding, staffing and evaluating the state's operations. The uncomfortable truth is that the impediment to governing economically in Connecticut, with its still robust means, isn't poverty of resources. It's the baggage of business as usual.

Spending plans built on the platform of earlier budgets tend to make assumptions that keep the status quo, and when the money runs short, decisions must be made on the basis of what there is to spend, not which programs deserve to be funded. That gets us $100 million cuts to education, loss of school transportation funds — wait and see what that does to regional magnet schools — and not much of a car tax subsidy after all. Nursing homes and hospitals get cuts.

Instead, the governor and the legislature should be looking at the merits of spending requests: Risk trying a new approach and reward only those that deliver. That can't be done in the waning days of a session. However, Governor Malloy's Second Chance Society, a revision of state incarceration policies still awaiting a decision from the legislature, could be approved as an example of the innovate-test-evaluate approach.

The state also needs the flexibility to experiment with new employment structures such as short-term contracted employment, which doesn't fit well with current employee bargaining agreements. But government is moving that way: outcome-based medical insurance payments, evaluation of teachers on the basis of student performance.

The state and its employees must also come to terms on a more balanced, sustainable retirement system. State employee unions would do well to be proactive and begin devising a new model that balances their members' secure retirement with the state’s financial reality and what the private sector has come to.

More than just difficult choices, these represent unpopular and unnerving social and economic change, the kind that no politician would consider if it could possibly be avoided. Nevertheless they would allow the state to budget for what it needs, not what it already has.

This is an election year for the state senators and representatives, who must be pretty well exhausted by their budget debates and not particularly thrilled with the results. So far, nearly two dozen, including the Speaker of the House, J. Brendan Sharkey of Hamden, a Democrat, have said they won't be running again.

The Republicans, whose role in the current budget decision making was marginalized as usual by the Democratic majority, can sense an opportunity. Best for the state would be a hard-fought fight on the principles of budget restructuring, followed by bipartisan governing no matter who wins the most seats.

There will be a lot of newcomers. They won't be accustomed to doing things as things have always been done. In the coming months, voters will want to know how they would do better.