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Donald Trump has, in recent weeks, laid out a vision of Republicans in Congress not actually needing to repeal Obamacare. Instead, the law will simply collapse on itself.

"The best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode," he said in late March. "It's exploding right now."

He doubled down on the claim the next morning on Twitter: "ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry!"

Since he made these comments in late March, new data has come out making a convincing case that Obamacare's marketplaces aren't exploding — and that, as recently as last fall, they were actually stabilizing.

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Kaiser Family Foundation put out new data this morning analyzing individual market performance for the past five years. Insurers did take a hit in 2014, the year Obamacare started. You can see on this chart that their earnings fell precipitously and, in 2015, insurers showed significant losses.

But 2016 was the year things seemed to turn around. Insurers climbed out of the red and showed a $13.54 per member profit.

Separate research from S&P Global finds similar results. They focused on the Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, nonprofit insurers that have come to dominate the Obamacare marketplaces.

S&P looks at something called the medical loss ratio, which is a measure of how much insurers are bringing in as premiums versus how much they are paying out as medical claims. If you have a medical loss ratio of 120 percent, it means you are spending $120 in medical bills for every $100 in premiums. But, perhaps more importantly, it means you are running a health insurance company hemorrhaging money that may soon go out of business.

The Blues plans had some pretty terrible loss ratios in 2014. The plan in Arizona, for example, had a 105 percent loss ratio. Vermont was at 104.5 percent.

But 2016 looks a lot different. The Arizona plan had a 90.1 percent loss ratio, and Vermont is down to 95.4 percent. The analysts at S&P say this shows "that the ACA individual market is not in a 'death spiral.'"

The Obamacare marketplaces aren't in collapse. But they still face challenges. The S&P report shows that there are still a handful of plans on the Obamacare marketplace that had medical loss ratios above 100 percent in 2016. This helps explain why rates went up a lot last open enrollment; it was these insurers trying to make sure that the premiums they charged could cover the medical bills.

There are areas of the marketplace — largely those that are rural with small populations — that are at risk of having zero health insurers in the marketplace next year. I wrote about those places earlier this week in VoxCare.

Those places are a challenge for the law — especially because Obamacare does not have any back-up plan. But even with those weak spots, the general trend with the marketplaces is toward stability. Insurers seem to be figuring out how to set premiums in the new marketplace at a level that will cover their medical bills.

If there is any uncertainty, it is in part manufactured by the Trump administration. The White House has stayed mum on key policy decisions, and that has insurers skittish about signing on for another year of marketplace coverage. Obamacare's marketplaces weren't on the path to explosion when Trump took office. But the president could easily push them in that direction.

Most health plans stick around Virginia marketplace

Big insurers Anthem and Aetna will continue selling on the Virginia marketplace in 2018, new filings with the State Corporation Commission show. UnitedHealth, however, will leave the marketplace.

Virginia has an unusually early deadline for health plans to file their 2018 plans. Most other states don't require insurance filings until the early summer.

While the Virginia plans have submitted notice that they will sell Obamacare coverage in 2018, they have not yet submitted their premium rates. Those aren't due until May 3.

Chart of the Day: Medical marijuana laws decrease prescriptions filled by Medicaid patients

Researchers at the University of Georgia find that Medicaid patients use fewer prescription drugs in states with medical marijuana. They estimate that what seems to be patients substituting marijuana for prescriptions could have saved the public program $1 billion annually in 2014.

Kliff's Notes

With research help from Caitlin Davis