Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are stealthily pushing through the no health care for you bill without hearings.

Republican senators are quietly moving toward something that has been their party’s goal for nearly eight years: dismantling the Affordable Care Act. The question, of course, is how they plan to replace it.

Republicans in the Senate will need 50 votes to pass their version of the American Health Care Act. Several senators have expressed reservations about the House version of the bill, which withdraws federal support for Planned Parenthood and rolls back the Medicaid expansion accomplished by the A.C.A.. Despite the lack of consensus within the party, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, on Wednesday began the process of fast-tracking the bill under Rule 14, which enables the Senate to bypass the committee process and instead move the bill on to the Senate calendar for a vote as soon as it is ready.

Yes, hurry up with this bill to take Medicaid away from people who need it, because what could be more urgent than that.

The A.H.C.A.’s fast-tracking is not driven by necessity, but rather by the concern that a more transparent legislative process would lay bare the reality that the bill, if passed, would cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance and drive up costs for millions of others.

Pause to reflect on that. These people are rushing to force the bill through with no hearings because they don’t want the public to notice that it will cause millions of Americans to lose their health insurance and drive up costs for millions of others. It will do what Republicans always do: take funding away from the poor and middling in order to shunt it to the very rich.

With only 20 percent of Americans supporting the A.H.C.A. (and only 8 percent believing the Senate should pass the House version of the bill), and support for Obamacare at an all-time high, Senate Republicans are in a bind. While abandoning the A.H.C.A. in favor of fixing Obamacare would reflect the will of the majority of the American people, it would require abandoning a central campaign pledge to the Republican base and result in an untenable reconciliation process with the more conservative House. But pursuit of a deeply unpopular policy that is likely to have disastrous health and economic consequences for millions could be far costlier as the Republicans face the possibility of a stinging defeat in 2018.

But much more to the point – it is likely to have disastrous health and economic consequences for millions. Can we keep our eye on the damn ball here? Can we forget the inside baseball for one second in order to focus on the horrific consequences for living breathing people?