A Democratic senator said she hopes her colleagues won’t break ranks and delay the new health care reform law to avoid a government shutdown.

“We’ve had a referendum on that, so we can keep debating it from the floor of the Senate, but you don’t get to hold the entire economy, the entire country, hostage because you don’t like the outcome of the election,” Elizabeth Warren (MA) said Friday at a conference at the University of Chicago.

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“We had an election in 2012, and a big part of what a lot of people talked about, including me (and) including the president of the United States, was health care, and the people who said no to the Affordable Care Act – they lost, (and) they are not in the majority,” Warren said.

She had originally been scheduled to speak in person at a kickoff event at the Institute of Politics, but Warren stayed behind in Washington, D.C., and spoke via satellite so she could vote on a proposal to temporarily fund the government.

Senate Democrats had stripped out a provision to fund the government but cut funding to the health care law.

House Republicans voted over the weekend on a proposal to fund the federal government in exchange for a yearlong delay in ACA implementation and the elimination of a tax on medical devices that would help fund the program.

Warren said she doubted the Senate majority would agree to any proposal by the House majority that would cut funding or delay the law’s implementation.

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“You can’t go down that path,” Warren said. “You can’t empower people by saying, ‘Here you are in the minority, and you’re going to shut down the whole government because something you don’t like has already – let’s be clear – passed the United States Senate, passed the House of Representatives, was signed into law by the president of the United States, was certified by the United States Supreme Court as constitutional and has partially gone into effect. That’s the democratic process.”

[Image via YouTube]