Democrats are in a desperate race to derail the Trump presidency before the president completely derails the Obama agenda.  And media Democrats are betraying their fear that Obamacare, the crown jewel of Obama's presidency, may be close to the end of the line.

Ryan Cooper at theweek.com, in a column titled "Republicans are closer to killing ObamaCare than you think," says repeal and replace "is quietly working its way through the Senate," with a compromise on the rollback of the Medicaid expansion "making passage far more likely."

Cooper's language reflects the Democrats' growing desperation and their constant pounding of apocalyptic messaging:

... dynamiting health care for poor Americans ... a brutal reduction in the quality of American health care ... a ratcheting noose ...

Mr. Cooper contends that Democrats need to counter with a "full-throated" single-payer plan:

Medicare for all will finish the work that ObamaCare started, and give the American citizenry something to vote for in addition to something to vote against. The unexpected come-from-behind success of Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. in the snap elections Thursday, partly on the strength of a full-throated left-wing manifesto, shows the potential of a genuinely bold agenda against conservative austerity politics.

The fear that "Obamacare is in real danger" is echoed at vox.com:

The possibility that Republicans will repeal Obamacare or drive it into collapse is an increasingly real one.

... But the fact that Republicans are coalescing around ending Medicaid expansion – once thought to be a major sticking point – suggests the path to repeal may be easier to find than initial expectations.

The New York Times is busy complaining that the Senate is "coming up with the legislation behind closed doors" and adds more doomsday language:

[S]crutiny before a vote would be the congressional equivalent of exposing a vampire to sunlight ... turn the American health care system into a facsimile of "The Hunger Games" ... give the wealthiest American families a fat tax cut[.]

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer has said, "Democrats are ready to work with President Trump to fix Obamacare if Republicans abandon their drive to repeal the law," but a column by Scott Ehrlich at thefederalist.com points out that the only way to "fix" the current law is to "double down on the parts people hate" – namely, to increase and enforce the individual mandate and to guarantee more subsidies to insurance companies (emphasis in original):

This is important because the only ways [sic] to tweak the ACA and make it sustainable, while not eliminating the benefits, is to take the parts people hated and make them more prevalent. This is no doubt why Democrats are so desperate for Republicans to work with them on repair now, when they had no issues passing the initial law on party lines. Any effective repair would be extremely unpopular, and they have no desire to walk that cliff alone.

Since even a Republican Congress is not dumb enough to go along with that, Democrats have no other avenue but obstruction and doomsday scare tactics.

David Catron at spectator.org confirms that Democrat fears that Senate Republicans are "easing ACA [the Affordable Care Act] toward the abyss." 

Catron notes that two recent major procedural steps pave the way for the repeal and replace bill:

The Senate parliamentarian ruled that repeal can be passed via reconciliation and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fast-tracked the process by invoking "rule 14," which permits the Senate to skip laborious committee hearings that Democrats planned to use for protracted grandstanding.

As Catron observes, implementation of Rule 14 takes away another forum for the Democrats' "portentous predictions of death and destruction."  The major issue remaining for Senate Republicans, says Catron, "is the speed at which Obamacare's Medicaid expansion is tossed onto the ash heap of history."  Once that is resolved, and a Congressional Budget Office score is received, the vote-counting can begin:

When the whip count reaches 50 or more, as it probably will before July 4, the Obamacare repeal and replace bill will go to the floor where no Republican senator will risk her career by casting the vote that prevents it from reaching President Trump's desk. There will be no braying about "Obamacare Lite," only a struggle to get in the shot when he signs the bill into law.

Whether any Trump-state Democrat senators wish to be in the group photo with the president remains to be seen.

But the president signing an Obamacare repeal is not quite the done deal the American Spectator's Catron would have us believe.  Nathaniel Weixel at thehill.com reinforces the crucial importance of messaging for Republicans, pointing out that the stream of insurers exiting the Obamacare exchanges may embolden reluctant Republicans to vote for repeal:

The more Republicans can convince the public that ObamaCare is failing, the easier it will be to convince the reluctant members of their own party that they need to take the political risk of voting for repeal.

The president met with a group of Republican senators on Tuesday, to encourage them to "get moving" on the repeal bill, but he avoided the misstep of setting a deadline as he had with the House bill.  As one senator in attendance said, "[h]e mostly just listened" as the group discussed several issues they are working through.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell emphasized the stakes to his Senate colleagues last week, as reported in The Wall Street Journal:

McConnell delivered a private warning to his Senate Republicans: If they failed to pass legislation unwinding the Affordable Care Act, Democrats could regain power and establish a single-payer health-care system.

The Democrat media's forebodings and Senator McConnell's fast-tracking the process are hopeful signs, but as Sally Pipes, writing at forbes.com, observes:

The GOP may not have made this mess, but the American people are counting on them to clean it up.

... What are they waiting for?