They know that their health care plan is extremely unpopular. It’s a reverse Robin Hood plan that would take insurance away from or worsen coverage for the middle class, poor, sick and elderly and use the savings to cut taxes for the affluent. That’s why the plan is opposed by experts across the ideological spectrum, as well as groups representing doctors, nurses, hospitals, cancer patients, heart-disease patients and many others.

By downplaying the odds of passage, senators are able to reduce the amount of attention and public opposition that their deliberations might receive. Meanwhile, they are moving quickly and almost entirely behind close doors to come up with a bill that makes only modest changes to the House-passed bill. Those changes are akin to “adding ketchup to rotten food,” as Andy Slavitt, who used to run Medicare and Medicaid, put it.

Democratic aides have grown especially worried that the Senate will pass a somewhat vague bill and then claim that they’ll fix any problems in a process known as conference — when the House and Senate negotiate over differences between bills that each have passed. Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has a good analysis of this possibility.

The whole game is distraction. The only way that the House could pass such an unpopular bill was to keep people from focusing on the substance of the bill, while rushing it through, and the Senate now seems to be following a version of that strategy.