OVER the last seven years, the Republican Party has engaged in increasingly elaborate political suicide attempts. The G.O.P. has nominated cranks and erstwhile witches and Todd Akin in winnable Senate races. It has engaged in Somme-esque trench warfare within its own congressional caucus, shut down the government without a strategy for winning anything out of it, and campaigned on a sub-Ayn Randian narrative about the heroic businessman and the mooching 47 percent. And then, after all its prior efforts at seppuku failed, the party nominated Donald Trump for the presidency.

You know how that turned out.

So it would be a foolish prognosticator indeed who assumed that Thursday’s House vote for the American Health Care Act, a misbegotten Obamacare quasi-replacement with the favorable ratings of diphtheria and the strong support of almost nobody on the right who cares about health policy, will necessarily be the undoing of the congressional G.O.P.

Perhaps House Republicans will be saved by masterly policy-making in the Senate (don’t laugh). Republican senators are basically promising to start from scratch with their own health care bill, which could lead to anything from the Bill Cassidy-Susan Collins proposal to allow red states to use Obamacare money for non-Obamacare experiments while blue states keep things as they are, to an A.H.C.A. rewritten to make it reasonably defensible as policy and non-suicidal in its politics.

Such a rewriting is theoretically possible: All you need to do is spend substantially more money on insurance subsidies than the House bill does, offer substantially more money to states for high-risk pools if they want to opt out of the pre-existing condition rules, and generally make the bill look less like a self-parodic exercise in cutting Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the rich. Since liberals tend to overestimate how much people value health insurance and how much effect it has on health, a better-funded alternative to Obamacare could lead to modest coverage reductions and still be less politically disastrous than some Democrats expect.