President Trump and Republicans in Congress have brought chaos to the American health care system by trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act and failing to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which, with bipartisan support for the past 20 years, has provided care for millions of children. Over the next few weeks they can choose to set things right or to destroy them.

Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray on Tuesday announced a bipartisan deal that could help stabilize the A.C.A.’s insurance markets and undo some of the damage Mr. Trump has done through administrative actions. In an ideal world, Congress would quickly pass that bill, which includes several Republican priorities, and, at the same time, reauthorize CHIP, which now covers nearly nine million children. But with Mr. Trump in the White House and feckless Republicans leading Congress, it’s possible that none of this will get done, health care costs will be driven up and millions of children will be left without health insurance.

First up, the Alexander-Murray deal represents real progress. These two no-nonsense lawmakers — the leading Republican and Democrat on the Senate health committee — have done yeoman’s work trying to fix a mess created largely by Mr. Trump. Their bill would appropriate money for payments to insurance companies that the president said he was stopping last week. He said they amounted to an illegal corporate bailout — a blatant lie. These payments, authorized by the A.C.A., or Obamacare, compensate insurers for lowering the deductibles and co-payments for low-income families. Further, Mr. Alexander and Ms. Murray would require the administration to spend $106 million on advertising and on people to help people sign up for insurance when open enrollment begins on Nov. 1. Mr. Trump’s minions at the Department of Health and Human Services slashed spending on outreach efforts in recent months.

The deal also advances two Republican health care ideas: giving states more flexibility to make changes to the A.C.A. and letting more people sign up for high-deductible health care policies. Thankfully, Mr. Alexander and Ms. Murray have made sure that neither of these changes undermines Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions and the requirement that insurers cover essential health services like maternity care and cancer treatment. These changes could make the law function better by allowing sparsely populated states to attract more insurers by, for example, making it easier for them to set up reinsurance programs that protect companies from losses from a few customers. And the proposed high-deductible plans could work well for a small subset of people who buy A.C.A. policies but do not receive subsidies because they earn too much money.