Also thanks to the A.C.A., I began buying my insurance through my state’s health care exchange website. Like the healthcare.gov site, it had a rocky start and was widely panned, but I loved it. It was an actual marketplace and not a shadowy industry where brokers and H.R. departments hammered out deals. I had several insurers offering me coverage, with transparent plan information and pricing. It was almost as if they were competing.

And still, I worried. With this new transparency, people would see the blemishes in the industry. What would they blame for these flaws, the new law or the system it was designed to repair?

When the marketplace was unable to transfer enrollee information from its computers to the health care insurers, it was viewed as a failure of government. But all my colleagues had war stories about failed data feeds. Getting these systems to communicate could be so difficult that sometimes companies didn’t even try; they hired people to re-enter the information manually.

By now I had moved on to a new job focused on Medicaid clients, which meant I encountered a pillar of Obamacare, the Medicaid expansion. Many more chronically ill people were now being covered by the government. This was my opportunity to see the costs of uninsured America, a giant pool of liability so muddied by the complexities of coding and poor data tracking that no one knew if it was two or 20 feet deep. I suspected America was far sicker than the politicians described.

One issue that stood out was the number of patients who had contracted sepsis, a blood infection. Unable to get medical care, patients had lived with infections for weeks, maybe months, until bacteria caught a ride into their blood streams. Now Medicaid was paying bills as large as $100,000, and those patients who did not die were facing months of recovery, and not a premium payment had been made to compensate for it.

President Trump has portrayed Obamacare as a cesspool. The problem was never Obamacare. It was uninsured America — people who had been cut out of the system, but who were nonetheless pushing us toward collective bankruptcy. Obamacare just cleaned the water enough for us to finally see the time bomb in the depths.

Republican plans to fix health care simply put mud back into the pool, finding new ways to stop covering sick Americans. Medicaid rolls will shrink again; insurers in certain states may cut what they cover. Even pre-existing conditions could become a problem again. While the draft of the Senate bill still technically requires insurers to cover these patients, it would let states petition to limit that coverage — who knows by how much. And the House version would let insurers charge them much more, putting private insurance out of reach for many.