Sheila Jackson Lee: “I thank the gentleman from California and the gentleman from Texas. Madam Speaker, I wonder: Does anyone know who Lisa…”

“I thank the gentleman from California and the gentleman from Texas. Madam Speaker, I wonder: Does anyone know who Lisa Gray is? Or the many Lisa Grays across America? Lisa Gray is a woman who, as a small business owner, admitted that if it had not been for the Affordable Care Act, she would not have been able to get the chemo treatment for her leukemia. Just think of the workers who are now getting affordable care access. Now, with this legislation, they will be cut to 39 or 38 or 32 hours, so as not to have the employee-mandated and responsible way of treating their health insurance. This bill that is on the floor today will give us a $53 billion deficit. It will result in 1 million people losing their employee- sponsored coverage like Lisa Gray or families that I saw coming for enrollment in Texas. It will increase the number of people obtaining coverage through Medicaid, CHIP, and the health insurance marketplace between 500,000 and 1 million and increase the number of uninsured by upwards of 500,000. Do we realize what we have gained through the Affordable Care Act? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance rose just 3 percent. That is far different from 7.9 percent before the Affordable Care Act. Where is all this noise that our insurance premiums are going up?…”