Fox News' Kilmeade slams GOP for shutdown: '8 million more people voted for' Obamacare

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade may be the last person anyone expected to make the case for President Barack Obama's health care reform law -- but that's exactly what he did on Tuesday.

Just hours after a stalemate in Congress forced a partial government shutdown, Fox & Friends host Elisabeth Hasselbeck praised Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and tea party Republicans because she said "it is worth the fight" to defund or delay Obamacare.

"All you have to do is look at the polls," co-host Steve Doocy agreed. "While it is law of the land, it is wildly unpopular in this country. So a lot of people go, 'You know what? The tea party wing of the Republican Party, they're holding the rest of the Congress hostage.' You know what? Those people, many of them were elected to -- they campaigned on, 'If you send me to Washington, I will do everything I can to defund or delay it.'"

Kilmeade then stunned his co-hosts by speaking up in defense of the law.

"You say it's unpopular and over 50 percent of the country doesn't seem to want it, but 8 million more people voted for it because Mitt Romney would have been president," Kilmeade pointed out.

"But the November election last time was not about Obamacare," Doocy objected.

"But he talked a lot about it," Kilmeade insisted. "And they knew that if they elected Mitt Romney, he would have repealed it."

"And on top of that, too, if this thing is so bad and is so unorganized as we're seeing this morning it is, why not let it start?" he added. "Because then you could get the Senate if you're a Republican and maybe you have a shot at the White House if you're a Republican, and you could begin to unwind it. But right now, it's been flooded with the lockdown information."

At that point, Hasselbeck introduced the inventor of the "death panels" myth, Betsy McCaughey, who had been joining the show throughout the morning for a scary segment called "Eyes on Obamacare."

McCaughey warned viewers that they "could end up spending a quarter to a third of your after tax income" if they choose a high-deductible plan and had a lot of medical expenses.

"I don't remember the president telling us that part," Doocy quipped.

"No, he said a lot of things that aren't apparently true," Hasselbeck opined.

McCaughey also said that the online portion of Obamacare was not "truly ready" because "information from Homeland Security, the IRS, the state agencies, Health and Human Services -- that's not totally ready."

"And you know what I wonder?" she remarked. "Remember when the United States invaded Normandy beach on D-Day, what if they hadn't been ready?"

"Betsy's our hero of the day," Hasselbeck concluded.

Watch the video below from Fox News' Fox & Friends, broadcast Oct. 1, 2013.