On Tuesday, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on the Ben Shapiro Show on KTTH to talk about Obamacare, characterizing it as destructive and President Obama's reaction to the law as irresponsible. Shapiro began:

Shapiro: Domestically, Senator Ted Cruz, President Obama has been alternatively gutting his own plan with regard to Obamacare and pushing it as hard as humanly possible, pushing it with measures including this ridiculous March Madness kind of sweet 16 routine. He's been doing virtually everything he can on the pop cultural front to push Obamacare. What do you make of President Obama's announcements over the weekend that actually were not gutting Obamacare, that the individual mandate would be going into place? What do you make of President Obama's seemingly desperate attempt to get young people to sign up? There was a report yesterday that maybe we've done all of this overhaul of the entire healthcare system basically to sign up 4-million people to Obamacare, because that's all that has signed up thus far.

Cruz: Well, that's true, but it's even worse than that. The administration will not release how many of those people were previously uninsured. McKinsey and Company did a study of those signing up and concluded that only 11% of the people had been uninsured and the vast majority previously had insurance. So, if that's true, then the healthcare system of hundreds of millions of people has been jeopardized to extend insurance to just a small number of people. The time McKinsey and Company studied it, there were roughly 3 million that were estimated to have been signed up. 11% works out to 330,000 people who didn't have insurance, who the administration got insurance because of Obamacare. You know, Ben, it would've been much cheaper to cut a check to each of those 330,000 people. We could've sent them a million bucks a piece and I guarantee you, they'd rather get a check for a million dollars...

You know my strongest reaction is the President is doing a lot of pop-culture. He's sitting between a couple of ferns, he's hanging out with basketball stars, he's trying to say everything is hip and hunky-dory without taking responsibility for the over 6 million people who've had their health insurance policies canceled because of Obamacare. Every time I travel home to Texas, I see someone that comes up to me and says, "Ted, my insurance has been canceled. I have a son that's sick, that has diabetes, I'm scared." This President looked at the American people, looked us in the eye and stated, willfully stated, something that was deliberately false, which is "If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." That is false! Instead of pretending like he is some paparazzi or pop-culture star, he oughta step forward and take some responsibility for the millions of people who are being hurt by this failed healthcare law. 

Later in the interview, Shapiro questioned Cruz about the alleged divisions within the Republican party and if Republicans differ on Obamacare as a whole or just the tactics on how to deal with it. Cruz stated:

Look, I think we're having a debate about what the Republican Party should stand for, and what we should fight for. There are some in Washington who suggest that there is a fundamental conflict between either A) Standing for principle, or B) Winning elections. They will say, sometimes with smug assurance, "You've got to win first." They're convinced the way you win is you don't take any risks, you don't stand for anything. Now, Ben, I think that's a false dichotomy. I think standing for principle is how you win elections. Nobody wants to win elections more than I do. Nobody wants Republicans to win the Senate in 2014 more than I do. Nobody wants us to win in 2016 more than I do because if we don't pull back from the fiscal and economic cliff that we're at, we are risking losing the greatest nation, the freest nation in the history of the world, and there is an urgency. We've got to pull back now.

Ted Cruz later cited the 2010 mid-term elections when the Tea Party swept the House as an example of Republicans standing on principle and the American people responding favorably.