Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.

[Q]: The two on Thursday toured a Lowndes County neighborhood where residents say the sewage system regularly overflows into their yards and homes. They then held a town hall in Hayneville. Charlie Mae Holcombe, 70, of Hayneville, said heavy rains are always a sign of trouble. Holcombe described the problems she faced as Gore and Barber spoke with her in her driveway. She said the toilets in her house will begin to bubble as a sign the sewage system is about to backup, sometimes filling her yard — including the area around a child’s swing set — and her house with raw sewage. “They have had to come and pump it out of my yard with the pump truck,” Holcombe said. “It’s backing up, even in my bathtub. The sewage has run over all in the house.” Her home in Lowndes County is in an area that has been plagued by sewage problems and concerns about potential illness. “I have heard about it and seen pictures of it for a long time, but it was shocking to see it in person,” Gore said of the conditions he saw. Alabama’s Black Belt region gets its name for the dark rich soil that once gave rise to cotton plantations. But the type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks, in which wastewater filters through the ground, to function properly, said Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris in an interview with The Associated Press. The region’s intense poverty and inadequate municipal infrastructure contribute to the problem. “Sewage is typically handled at a local level... These counties haven’t always been able to do that,” Harris said. Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who has worked on rural environmental issues in the county for years, said wastewater sanitation problems are not limited to Alabama’s Black Belt. “It’s all over the country,” Flowers said, adding that climate change, with heavy rains and rising water tables, will make it worse. Holcombe said she’s not sure what it means, but when a red light flashes at a sewage treatment lagoon across the street, it is a reliable sign that her yard will flood. In addition to overwhelmed septic and sewage systems, some homes in the rural county are on “straight pipe” systems where sewage runs untreated from home to yard. Harris said a May survey of almost 200 Lowndes County households found that two to three percent of the households were on straight pipe systems. Holcombe’s home sits not far from the state highway where voting rights marchers walked from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Barber noted the proximity to the key sites of the civil rights movement and said the environmental issues are about the continued fight for justice. The town hall, held at a community center in Hayneville, focused on a number of environmental issues. Birmingham resident Jimmy Smith described living near a Superfund site in Birmingham. Others described concerns about landfills, straight pipe sewage systems and coal ash disposal in the Black Belt. At the town hall, Gore criticized what he described as the continued resistance from power companies and politicians to switching to renewable forms of energy such as solar energy. “It’s really a disgrace that this far Southern state with abundant sunshine is deprived of the advantages of the solar revolution being enjoyed all over the world,” Gore said.
[A]: Environmental justice issues focus of town hall.


[Q]: That could all change with a controversial Nov. 4 ballot initiative in which voters will get to decide for the first time whether to abolish a 1963 state law designed to protect small businesses. The law requires North Dakota pharmacies to be owned by local pharmacists or run by hospitals with a local pharmacist on staff. Supporters of the initiative argue it will remove an embarrassing anachronism, give consumers more choice and lower prescription drug costs. Opponents say that allowing national chains would destroy North Dakota’s tradition of personalized pharmacy care and be yet another example of how the state’s neighborly way of life is changing too fast. Canada, Germany, France and many other countries, they also note, have similar laws requiring local pharmacy ownership. “Independent pharmacies are more apt to focus on customer service,” said Gabe Gretz, who bought Service Drug Pharmacy in Williston last year with his father. “This is our bread and butter. It’s not just a hobby for us.”  “North Dakota Nice” is a truism here, not an irony, and most retail stores are still prohibited from opening before noon on Sunday - a throwback to laws designed to encourage family time. Yet since the oil boom began around 2010, drawing thousands of new residents to jobs where roughnecks can earn more than $100,000 a year, drug use, assault and other violent crimes have jumped. Recent sex-trafficking charges brought against an oil field worker in Williston, a once quiet town that is now the epicenter of the boom, marked the first charges of that type ever filed in the area and has escalated tension between new and old residents. Many newly arrived oil workers, and even some locals, say they hope the ballot measure passes so that they can use the  same chains they’ve grown accustomed to elsewhere. Rite Aid Corp has no outpost in the state, North Dakota’s Walmarts have no in-store pharmacies and the state’s lone Walgreens, on the Minnesota border, is prohibited from selling prescription drugs. CVS is able to operate only a handful of pharmacies in North Dakota thanks to a 2006 buyout of several Osco Drug stores that operated before the 1963 law. “Honestly, it’s not convenient getting my prescriptions here,” said Jan Anseth, a resident of Williston who spends winters in Arizona where she gets her medications from a national chain. In North Dakota, Anseth says, she runs into problems transferring prescriptions and getting anything more than a 30-day supply. The ballot’s primary sponsor, North Dakotans For Lower Pharmacy Prices, was funded with $168,000 in contributions from Walmart, Walgreens, Kmart and others. In campaign materials, the group cites data the Kaiser Family Foundation compiled in 2009 showing North Dakota has one of the highest per capita costs for prescription drug and medical devices in the country. Walmart says North Dakotans are missing out on its popular $4 prescription program, which makes many generic drugs available at the sharply discounted price. Crying foul, the state’s independent pharmacists say they’re able to often meet or beat prices from national chains, most of whom lose money on pharmacy sales as a way to get customers in the door. A random survey by Reuters of North Dakota’s independent pharmacies showed that a 30-day supply of the generic blood thinning drug clopidogrel ranged in price between $10 and $59.95. A CVS in Bismarck, the state capital, quoted a price of $149.95 for the same dosage. “I get to set the prices here at my pharmacy,” said Jenna Wahlstrom, a pharmacist at Larsen Service Drug, which her grandfather founded in Watford City in 1952. “It’s not a corporate decision.”  Like the big chains, Wahlstrom offers her customers a smartphone app and online refill ordering. Her pharmacy has transferred hundreds of prescriptions from retail chains for workers who have moved to the state, she said. Ahead of the vote, the state’s top politicians are declining to take sides. Governor Jack Dalrymple, a Republican who took office in 2010, says he shops at locally owned Aerohead Plaza Drug while in Bismarck and believes it has been able to compete effectively with the nearby CVS. Yet in the 1990s, as a state legislator, Dalrymple voted to keep the pharmacy law intact. “I don’t know,” he now says, “if that was the right vote.”
[A]: Big pharmacies knock on door of oil-rich North Dakota.


[Q]: Many areas of Saudi consumption, including the retail industry, housing and travel, have ballooned in the past decade because of oil-fuelled growth in national income. But healthcare has lagged, partly because of government inefficiency and bureaucracy. Now the mediocre quality of state-run healthcare has become a political liability for the government, especially in the wake of the 2011 uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, which underlined the risks of social discontent. Many Saudis complain about overcrowded hospitals and shortages of medications. So the government has embarked on a drive to reform the sector, building hundreds of hospitals, providing interest-free loans to private companies and changing health insurance rules. This could make Saudi Arabia the world’s fastest-growing major healthcare market over the next few years, helping to diversify the economy beyond oil and providing a bonanza to foreign companies selling medicines, equipment and services. “It is a case of chronic underinvestment and reactive overexpenditure,” said Mohammad Kamal, an analyst at financial firm Arqaam Capital in Dubai. The standard of Saudi Arabian healthcare provision has long contrasted with its wealth. The kingdom, which the IMF ranked 30th in the world by GDP per capita for 2012, has 2.2 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, according to Arqaam, lower than the global average of 3.0 and far below the average of 5.5 in developed countries. Local newspapers routinely report complaints about issues such as overcrowding - with some patients receiving intravenous drips in hospital corridors - and poor hygiene and maintenance, resulting in pest infestations and infections. Abdulkarim al-Thobeiti, a Saudi engineer working in the public sector, says he will never set foot in a state-run hospital because they are either fully booked or poorly maintained. “If you want to make an appointment to see a doctor you have to wait for months, unless you have some connection or know someone who can pull a few strings,” Thobeiti said. This may change as the government ramps up healthcare budgets. Spending has already jumped from $8 billion in 2008 to $27 billion last year, and Saudi asset management firm NCB Capital expects it to soar to $46 billion in 2017. In addition to building new state-run facilities, the government is offering private companies interest-free loans covering up to a half of the cost of building new hospitals. And, although the move has yet to be announced officially, Saudis employed in the public sector are expected to become eligible for state-funded health insurance within the next few years, Arqaam and other analysts say. This would enable them to use private healthcare services without paying extra fees out of their own pocket. Today, the overwhelming majority, about 83 percent, of Saudi Arabia’s 8.4 million health insurance holders are expatriates whose employers are legally obliged to cover their insurance costs, according to Arqaam. The insurance reform could swell the pool with more than a million Saudi public servants and about 5 million of their dependents, Arqaam estimates. This implies a surge in demand for private Saudi healthcare firms, which are turning to the stock market to finance expansion. Sulaiman Al-Habib Medical Group and Almana General Hospitals will seek to list their shares on the local bourse in 2014 or early 2015, bankers told Reuters in November. Some companies have already tapped the market. Dallah Healthcare raised 540 million rials ($144 million) in an initial public offering of shares at the end of 2012, while National Medical Care Co conducted a 175 million rial IPO last March. Major global players are also looking for ways to boost their presence. General Electric (GE), one of the biggest manufacturers of medical equipment, has said it will build an assembly facility in Saudi Arabia. “Looking ahead at 2014, we continue to see a buoyant healthcare sector for the kingdom,” said Mazen Dalati, chief executive of GE Healthcare in the country. The development of a private healthcare industry is good news for the Saudi government as it tries to diversify the economy and boost employment of citizens in the private sector to make the country less vulnerable to a big drop in oil prices. Higher state spending will not necessarily translate into quick improvements, however, as shown by the slow progress in the last few years of Saudi Arabia’s $67 billion housing program, which was stalled by red tape and weak coordination between ministries. Analysts doubt in particular that the government will meet its own hospital construction targets. For private providers, human resources could become a bottleneck, especially if the government presses ahead with a plan to gradually replace foreign workers, who hold more than half the jobs in the sector, with Saudi nationals. Today, 20 percent of workers at healthcare companies are required to be Saudi citizens. The government is looking for ways to reduce the shortage of qualified personnel, including through partnerships with foreign firms such as GE. Reflecting such obstacles, healthcare firms’ stock prices have lost steam since the post-IPO rallies commonly enjoyed by new Saudi listings. While the overall stock market has risen 16 percent since June, shares in Dallah are up just 11 percent, and National Medical Care has lost 8 percent. Future expansion of healthcare facilities, however, will be driven not just by increased government spending but also by fundamental factors such as the continuing growth of Saudi Arabia’s young population and the high incidence of lifestyle-related diseases. One in every three people in the country is obese, according to the local Obesity Research Centre, whose researchers are looking into whether Saudis are genetically predisposed to the condition. “Saudi Arabia has an exceptionally high incidence of diabetes, heart disease and congenital disorders,” said John Sfakianakis, chief investment strategist at Saudi investment firm MASIC. “The insurance sector changes will provide extra demand for sure.”
[A]:
Saudi healthcare booms as state scrambles to close welfare gap.