Just becaue Yglesias says so?

Brad wants Yglesias to get a fair shake, over and over and over, until we are shaken. The fair shake is usually the government health insurance programs, and Yglesias raises the usual:

Yglesias » Is Repealing the Affordable Care Act Secretly About Replacing It With a Different Secret Law?: In a word: No. But don’t tell wonk-turned-hack Douglas Holtz-Eakin who explains:

Replacing PPACA with real health-care reform that delivers quality care at lower costs. That is what the repeal vote is really about.

I always forget if I’m allowed to use the word “bullshit” on an official CAPAF website (that was a mention—thanks Professor Goldfarb!), but I think this is best analogized to the solid waste of a male bovine. This just isn’t how public policy works. We change (or “replace”) laws all the time, and it doesn’t happen by first repealing predecessor laws tout court and then gesturing vaguely at a replacement. My guess is that Holtz-Eakin has a bunch of ideas about ways to improve health care policy in the United States relative to the post-ACA status quo. My guess is that I even agree with some of those ideas. The way to get those ideas enacted is to start explaining them to the press and the public and start talking to members of congress about turning them into bills.
At this point I’m not actually sure what the repeal vote is “really” about, but it’s definitely not about starting concrete conversations about further changes to the American health care system.

First, there is no rule that says repeal, reversion or replacement is not part of any reorganization of government law. Congress does not write in stone and repeal is part of the Congressional tool kit, available to the current Congress.

Second, talking about the health business may actually involve talking about patients and doctors and leaving government out of the discussion.

Third, Talking about the health business may include admitting to Congressional ignorance of individual transactions, and our own inability to measure medical affairs on a fine grain.

There is huge amounts of evidence that further involvement of Congress in health insurance will incur very high adjustment costs over the next few years, likely to trigger multiple debt crisis.  The safest thing to do is delay until we figured out the economy.  Let's not forget, it is the household that pays for debt crisis. Yglesias, Pelosi and Obama have stepped into a government mess that will delay recovery for some time.