Nancy L. Johnson: “The gentleman's point is very well taken. It is worth noting that Connecticut, with no employer mandate, has almost the…”

“The gentleman's point is very well taken. It is worth noting that Connecticut, with no employer mandate, has almost the same percentage of its population covered between employer-provided benefits and publicly provided benefits, and we are now in the process of doing a careful analysis in our big cities where the majority of our uninsured live as to who is uncovered and why they are not covered and what we can do to get them coverage and get them into the system. Mr. Speaker, we are within 1 rac{1}{2} ext{ percent of Hawaii. I know that through this kind of analysis of our cities and of our own specific community-based problems that we can solve our access problem without the down side of an employer mandate, which in a State that depends entirely for its future on growth in mid-sized businesses and young, new venture capital businesses, cannot afford to discourage job growth by increasing the cost of hiring. Mr. Speaker, I want to point out just one little aspect of the impact on economic growth of this mandate on women, because it is very significant. Just as women are going to take the brunt of the firings, most of the job loss is going to be among female employees. So women are going to be specifically and disparately impacted by the discouragement of economic growth that the employer mandate provides. Mr. Speaker, in recent history, in recent years, women have founded far more small businesses than have men.”