I’ve lost count of the number of Tweets from liberals I’ve seen in the past few weeks declaring that the GOP was “about to take away healthcare” from some number of millions of poverty stricken children who will now live in alleyways scrounging food out of dumpsters. This, of course, is part of their tactic of putting the GOP “on notice” regarding the repeal of Obamacare. That linked item dealt with a warning from Chuck Schumer, but there are a few other things he might not have “noticed” during all of this grandstanding.

One of them is a new report, featured at the Free Beacon, which shows that not everyone was getting a chance to enjoy health insurance benefits. In particular, there were well over a quarter million folks who had bigger things on their minds when their employers had to eliminate their jobs because of the law.

Obamacare has cost roughly 300,000 small business jobs due to higher health care costs, according to a new report.

The American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, released findings Wednesday that rising premiums and regulations under the Affordable Care Act have had “dire” consequences for the labor market.

The report found the law has cost $19 billion in lost wages per year and forced 10,000 small businesses establishments to close their doors. The study covered employers with 20 to 99 employees.

If only someone had been able to predict this when the law was initially being debated and warned us. Oh, that’s right… we did. And it worked out pretty much precisely as the free market is supposed to. Small businesses operate on the tightest margins. When you drive up the operating costs of providing all of this mandatory insurance and reduce the number of available options to choose from, the business owner is in trouble. That means less hiring, more layoffs, or – in the case of 10,000 small businesses – simply no longer being able to compete and shutting your doors.

If you happen to be a cheerleader of Obamacare that might actually seem like good news. I mean, rather than having whatever employer provided health insurance they were getting by with before, the newly unemployed probably had little choice but to sign up for the ACA options and pad the president’s numbers. Unfortunately for them, when you’re trying to get by on unemployment you still make too much money to qualify for the highest levels of subsidies which would allow you to get one of those plans with massively high deductibles nearly for “free.” And without the subsidies, the rates for even the cheapest Obamacare plans are probably bankrupting you. But it’s still better than having to get nailed by the IRS for failing to have health insurance, right?

Repealing this disaster was the only option left to us. Nobody is “taking away your healthcare” because health insurance is not healthcare. The good news is that if the new plan which replaces it provides for more competition in all aspects of the healthcare and insurance industries and more providers are participating, you’re going to get lower premiums. That’s how the free market works. Amazing, I know. If only somebody had told the Democrats in 2009.