Cantor: Cutting Obamacare should be 'on the table' in debt negotiations

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) says that President Barack Obama must be willing to cut health care reforms that are expected to reduce the nation's debt if he is serious about deficit-reduction negotiations with Republicans.

Although the Supreme Court found the Affordable Care Act to be constitutional and the American people recently re-elected the president by a wide electoral margin, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has insisted that his party would continue to work to repeal the law, writing in an op-ed last week that "Obamacare has to go."

On Monday, Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked Cantor if Republican leaders were going to demand that Obama's health care law be on the chopping block as a part of debt negotiations.

"If the president is serious about joining us and fixing the problem, he ought to be putting Obamacare on the table," Cantor explained. "There is no question in my mind, that is the largest expansion of government programs that we’ve seen."

He added: "All I can say is that the president has got to get serious and the Speaker is correct, that Obamacare is such an expansion of government spending and involvement in folks’ lives it ought to be on the table."

But the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the Affordable Care Act "would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion over the 2010–2019 period." And the effect of repealing the law "is likely to be an increase in the vicinity of $230 billion."

Watch this video from Fox News, broadcast Nov. 26, 2012.

[Photo credit: Gage Skidmore]

(h/t: Think Progress)