Are you confused by what’s happening as the Senate debates various health-care-reform proposals? Join the club. “I read and analyze health legislation for a living. And I’m having trouble keeping up with the big and complicated changes in real time,” Larry Levitt, a senior vice-president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tweeted on Tuesday night, as a series of votes began. On Wednesday, there were more votes, and there will be still more on Thursday—many, many of them, as the process climaxes in a so-called Vote-O-Rama.

Many of these votes don’t mean much: they concern Democratic amendments that have no chance of passing. But some of the votes are highly consequential, and two of them have already delivered significant setbacks to the Republican Party leadership. On Tuesday night, an amended version of the Better Care Reconciliation Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, was defeated, with fifty-seven senators voting against it, including nine Republicans. And, on Wednesday afternoon, a proposal to repeal Obamacare but put off a replacement for two years, which was McConnell’s Plan B, was also defeated, this time with fifty-five senators against it.

Much of the news coverage and commentary then began to focus on the last remaining big vote, on a so-called skinny-repeal bill, which could take place late Thursday. Skinny repeal could be considered McConnell’s Plan C. But before considering the details of this proposal it is worth dwelling for a moment on what has already happened. Earlier this week, McConnell got senators to agree to start a floor debate without knowing what sort of proposals would be considered. This cynical tactic gave new life to the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare. The subsequent votes then represented an important victory for everybody who has opposed the Republicans’ plans, and especially those who have sought to exert pressure on elected G.O.P. officials.

In failing to pass either a repeal-and-replace bill or a repeal-only bill, the G.O.P. has publicly demonstrated that it’s too fractured to turn history back to before March of 2010, when the A.C.A. became law. The effort to resurrect the Better Care Reconciliation Act ran into opposition from ultra-conservative senators, such as Mike Lee and Rand Paul, who didn’t think the bill went far enough, as well as moderate Republicans, such as Susan Collins, Dean Heller, and Lisa Murkowski, who were concerned about the slashing cuts to Medicaid that the measure contained. Then, in opposing the repeal-only bill, which would have created great uncertainty for tens of millions of Americans and chaos in the health-care industry, four more moderates joined Collins, Heller, and Murkowski: Lamar Alexander, Shelley Moore Capito, John McCain, and Rob Portman.

Taken together, these votes suggest that it is now highly likely that a good deal of Obamacare will remain in place—the unresolved question is just how much.

If you believe the news reports about what the skinny-repeal bill will look like when McConnell finally releases it, most of the A.C.A. appears likely to emerge unscathed, including the Medicaid expansion, which has enabled about fourteen million Americans to get health care; the Obamacare exchanges, where more than twelve million people signed up this year to purchase private insurance; the federal subsidies that greatly reduce the cost of these policies for low-to-middle-income households; the regulations that force insurers to offer comprehensive policies; the prohibition on insurers barring people with preëxisting conditions; and the taxes on the one per cent that help to finance the system. A number of reports say that the skinny-repeal bill would target only the individual and employer mandates, as well as the taxes on medical devices.

Of course, these reports could be wrong. And, in any case, it is unwise to take at face value anything that McConnell plans to do. Repealing the two mandates would have broad and damaging repercussions. According to a 2015 analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, eliminating the individual mandate would increase the number of uninsured by about fifteen million over a decade and raise premiums for everybody else by about twenty per cent. Among health-care experts, there is debate about whether, as enrollment in insurance plans fell and prices rose, the Obamacare exchanges could then eventually enter a death spiral. On Wednesday, Levitt warned about this as a serious possibility. Loren Adler, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, said that although repealing the mandates would create some serious problems, it would not be sufficient to destroy the insurance exchanges, because the continued availability of the federal subsidies would prevent the number of enrollees from falling too far.

The other, even bigger, problem with the skinny-repeal bill is that it likely won’t be designed to be the final version of the Republican legislation. Practically everybody on Capitol Hill believes that McConnell is putting it forward as a ruse to toss the ball to a House-Senate conference, which could then come back with a much broader bill that would torpedo the insurance exchanges, roll back the Medicaid expansion, and get rid of the taxes on the rich.

“GOP leaders would craft that version behind closed doors during Congress’ August recess and in early September,” Bob Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, warned in a blog post on Wednesday. “They would then present it to the House and Senate for final votes later in September, with limited debate and no amendments allowed—and with GOP leaders applying maximum pressure on Republican senators and House members to fall in line. In short, the ‘skinny repeal’ bill is a Trojan horse designed to resuscitate the effort to repeal large parts of the ACA and impose big Medicaid cuts that would jeopardize coverage for millions of the nation’s neediest people.”

Based on McConnell’s record, there is every reason to suppose that he would very much like this scenario to play out as Greenstein described it. After the votes on Tuesday and Wednesday, however, many people on Capitol Hill are doubtful that even the Senate Majority Leader, with all his Machiavellian ways, will be able to pull it off. “Almost every GOP aide I’ve talked to—both House and Senate—are skeptical that a conference committee will come up with something that can pass the Senate,” Axios’s Caitlin Owens reported on Wednesday evening. “If the Senate couldn’t accomplish this feat itself, the reasoning goes, why would a conference committee that must bridge the gap between Senate moderates and the House Freedom Caucus?”

If the skinny-repeal bill got through the Senate, but the effort to put together a more comprehensive piece of legislation then failed, the Republican leaders from both houses could conceivably settle for making the Senate bill law—and Donald Trump could conceivably declare victory on health care and move on. But I am getting ahead of the story. Right now, it isn’t entirely clear if McConnell will get anything passed at all, and the most effective way to insure that the G.O.P.’s effort to wreck Obamacare is permanently frustrated would be to prevent the skinny-repeal bill from getting fifty-one votes. If that is what you would like to see happen, and especially if you live in a red state, this is a good day to call your senator.

*This post has been updated to clarify when the Vote-O-Rama begins.