It’s not complicated. When you tax something more, you get less of it. Certainly political leaders know this; it’s why cigarette and alcohol taxes are high.

So it was never a very honest or realistic claim that the medical devices tax in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) wasn’t going to have a negative effect on innovation.

The tax is a 2.3 percent levy on all medical devices — things like pacemakers and valves and hip implants and even surgical gloves.

Jonathan Cohn in the left-leaning The New Republic noted, “Its primary purpose is to generate revenue — about $30 billion over ten years — in order to help pay for the expansion of Medicaid and creation of new tax credits that will help low- and middle-income Americans get health insurance.”

Frankly, that’s not very much revenue. It doesn’t go far at all to pay the tab for the ACA. And there’s growing evidence the tax is already doing harm. It’s serving to stifle innovation. And it’s costing jobs in the medical industry.

Last week, a Senate committee held a hearing on the tax.

“I’ve had the opportunity to visit a lot of medical device companies, and I plead with them to show me their books,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio. “Sometimes they do, and what’s happened is two things. One, companies in Ohio have been forced, because of the bottom line, to lay people off…The second thing that is happening is research is being cut back. And what they tell me is, ‘Rob, what we are going to do next year is change our budget for research because our bottom line isn’t as good because of this tax on our revenue, and we don’t want to lay people off, so we’re going to try not to. The only way to do that is to cut back on our research.'”

A new survey by the Advanced Medical Technology Association puts numbers on Portman’s claim.

“The tax has resulted in employment reductions of approximately 14,000 industry workers and forgone hiring of 19,000 workers,” the industry group says. “The total job impact of the tax on industry employment was approximately 33,000.”

That’s direct job impact. Indirectly, when suppliers and contractors are included, as many as 165,000 jobs have been lost or not created

And 30.6 percent — nearly one-in-three — medical tech firms said they have reduced research and design, the group noted.

“This tax, which has already required the payment of more than $1 billion by device manufacturers, is especially pernicious because it is assessed on gross sales, not profits,” added Henry I. Miller, writing in Forbes in 2013.

In other words, companies pay the tax whether they make a profit or not. That’s particularly hard-hitting in the medical device field, because it takes a long time to develop, test and get approval for any device. It’s an expensive process, and actual profits aren’t realized for years and years.

The good news is there seems to be some bipartisan agreement on killing the medical device tax. Congress should do so immediately.