How’s ‘repeal and replace’ going?

Jonathan Bernstein checks in with the House GOP to see how the “replace” portion of “repeal and replace” is going:

As I did last time, I checked with the three main committees that might be holding hearings. Ways and Means had a hearing on health care fraud, but there’s no indication that it’s in the context of developing a bill. Energy and Commerce had two hearings about ACA implementation and funding (here and here), both of which would be appropriate to a strategy of amending and improving ACA but utterly irrelevant to replacing it. Ed and Labor ... sorry, Education and the Workforce held a hearing on employer health care costs, which seemed from the subcommittee press release to be focused mainly, again, on bashing “ObamaCare” and its supposed “government takeover of health care.”

Now, I should note that subcommittee Chair Phil Roe did hint in that press release that replacement was still on the agenda. And it’s still only been two months. But, at least as I can gather from the materials on the various committee web sites, replace is still just empty rhetoric, primarily employed because polling shows that repeal-only is massively unpopular.