Watching the White House trying to spin today’s CBO report — which concluded that ObamaCare will directly result in the equivalent of over 2 million workers leaving the workforce in the next ten years — was like watching a parody of the White House trying to spin today’s CBO report (although I can’t quite decide if it’s the White House’s or Harry Reid’s reaction, arguing that the report’s conclusion is actually a positive because “we live in a country where we should be free agents,” that really deserves first prize on that one. I can’t even talk about Nancy Pelosi‘s.).

Unfortunately for Democrats, this is hardly the end of the ridiculously tortured spinning they’re going to have to do ahead of the midterms; as Rep. Issa pointed out today in his own reaction, the CBO was originally working off of a set of assumptions that are changing now that the law is actually happening. The CBO (along with the rest of us) is finally finding out what’s in it, and there are certainly plenty more unpleasant “discoveries” left to come:

CBO originally said this was going to be budget-neutral, it bought in to a lot of assumptions that healthcare costs would go down, all these good things would happen. But, in fact, as the rollout begins, and you’re beginning to be able to score the actual effects, you’re now realizing, this is a job-killer. … 2,400 pages get thrown together at the last minute after the score was in, and then 70,000 and counting pages of new regulations. What the CBO is able to do now is look at the law as it is and find out it’s very different than what then-Speaker Pelosi said was going to happen. There are lots of things they said would happen that won’t happen, and quite frankly, there’s other surprises yet to come as we see that in fact this is a big increase in Medicaid… We were talking about the fact that at some point, people are going to realize that we taxed medical devices, and the assumption that was in the bill was that the cost of medical devices wouldn’t go up even though we’re adding a tax to these devices. Everyone knows that if you tax something it’s going to get passed on to the consumer in the way of higher costs… This really is a law that was written badly from the ground up.