TASK DEFINITION: Given a paragraph and a claim, classify it this way: If the claim contradicts the evidence present in the paragraph, classify the claim as '0'. If the claim has multiple supporting *AND* contradicting evidences, classify the claim as '1'. If the claim has supporting evidence and the paragraph is in overall favor of the claim, then classify the claim as '2'.
PROBLEM: Paragraph: "In metro Atlanta, the land of smog alerts and farmland-turned-to-suburbs, one local county makes a bold claim about its efforts to be environmentally conscious. DeKalb County, its website says, is ""the greenest county in America."" Let's put that on some recycled paper and send it to each of the county's estimated 750,000 residents. DeKalb's communications director, Burke Brennan, sent PolitiFact Georgia an e-mail making the case for the county. It includes: ""In DeKalb County, we are taking the lead on sustainability ...  we are one step closer to being the greenest county in America,"" DeKalb County Chief Executive Officer Burrell Ellis said in 2009 when the county was honored by the ARC. Many folks we discussed this claim with used phrases like ""bold"" or ""ambitious"" to describe DeKalb's audacity, not willing to publicly dismiss it. Some were willing to criticize the claim. ""That's all a good case for them to be one of the greenest counties in Georgia,"" said Mark Woodall, Georgia chapter chairman of the Sierra Club, which claims to be the largest grassroots environmental organization in the state. ""DeKalb being the greenest county in America seems pretty unthinkable."" Being ""green,"" means many things these days. Some organizations have occasionally released surveys rankings America's greenest cities, but we found few similar rankings of counties. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a non-profit organization that works to improve health and health care for Americans, earlier this year looked at the environmental health of each U.S. county. One category was physical health. The foundation used data put together by researchers from the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine the physical health of each county. The criteria included how many days the air was unhealthy, the number of days the air was unhealthy due to ozone, access to healthy foods and how many liquor stores were in a county. DeKalb ranked near the bottom of Georgia counties, 153rd, in terms of physical health. Some categories that DeKalb is bragging about are difficult to compare. In other areas, such as the number of LEED-certified buildings, Dekalb has competition. Gwinnett had three LEED-certifiied structures, according to the U.S. Green Building Council. DeKalb is an Energy Star partner -- a federal effort to protect the environment through energy-efficient practices -- but so are Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties and the city of Atlanta. On hiking and biking trails, DeKalb may run into some argument about having the most in Georgia. Cobb County, for example, lists about 75 miles of trails within its cities and unincorporated areas. It was suggested we look at Arlington County, Va. to find another county that could make a case it is greener than DeKalb. The county has a page on its website with more than a dozen awards and recognition for its sustainable community and environmental efforts. Arlington won two National Association of Counties Achievement Awards this year for its recycling efforts. That organization also named Arlington its Outstanding Civil Engineering Project award in 2006 for its Green Building Program. Other counties, like Boulder, Colo., have goals such as reducing outdoor water use by 50 percent by using indigenous plants and recycling 50 percent of construction waste. DeKalb's case was muddied in December when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fined $453,000 for 836 sewage spills over the last five years. The EPA estimates there are about 40,000 spills from the nation's 25,000 sewage systems a year. California officials reported about 2,000 spills into the San Francisco Bay in 2008. Brennan noted the day after the fine was announced, county commissioners voted 6-1 to spend $1.345 billion to make repairs to its water and sewer system, nearly twice as much money as the EPA recommended. DeKalb taxpayers will pay higher water and sewer bills to help fund the work. Despite the fine, Brennan stuck by DeKalb's claim. ""Nobody here is claiming perfection, but based on the programs, awards, designations and initiatives DeKalb has in place and ongoing, I am sticking with the motto 'DeKalb is the greenest county in America,' "" Brennan told us in an e-mail. ""After all, 'Cowboy Capital of the World' was already taken,"" added Brennan, referring to Oakdale, Calif.  DeKalb has certainly tried to make its mark as an environmentally conscious county. But DeKalb's claim of being the ""greenest county"" in the nation ignores critical facts that would give a visitor to its web site a different impression." Claim: The Greenest County in America.

SOLUTION: 0

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Amid warnings from public health officials that a 2020 outbreak of a new coronavirus could soon become a pandemic involving the U.S., alarmed readers asked Snopes to verify a rumor that U.S. President Donald Trump had “fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.” The claim came from a series of tweets posted by Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information, a newsletter he describes as being about “politics and power.” Legum’s commentary was representative of sharp criticism from Democratic legislators (and some Republicans) that the Trump administration had ill-prepared the country for a pandemic even as one was looming on the horizon. Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the Trump administration in preceding years that had gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” firing claim referred to news accounts from Spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, whom the Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been fired one month prior. It’s thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time. Legum stated in a follow-up tweet that “Trump also cut funding for the CDC, forcing the CDC to cancel its efforts to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics in 39 of 49 countries in 2018. Among the countries abandoned? China.” That was partly true, according to 2018 news reports stating that funding for the CDC’s global disease outbreak prevention efforts had been reduced by 80%, including funding for the agency’s efforts in China. But that was the result of the anticipated depletion of previously allotted funding, not a direct cut by the Trump administration. And as the CDC told FactCheck.org, the cuts were ultimately avoided because Congress provided other funding. Claim: The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs.

SOLUTION: 2

PROBLEM: Paragraph: "Saying Medicaid is a broken system that should not be expanded in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry and the state’s U.S. senators suggested many physicians decline to serve patients insured by the state-federal program. In an April 1, 2013, press release issued in conjunction with their joint Texas Capitol press conference, Perry and Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, all Republicans, said that nationally, Medicaid expenditures surged from 1990 to 2010, outpacing its caseload. Also, their press release said: ""Only three in 10 Texas doctors are currently accepting new Medicaid patients."" Elaborating in the press conference, Perry said: ""And we fear that number may actually decrease if expansion went through."" The 3-in-10 claim, brought to our attention by analyst Anne Dunkelberg of Austin’s liberal-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities, sounded familiar, especially after spokespeople for Perry and each senator said by email that it was based on a 2012 survey of Texas physicians by the Texas Medical Association. Preliminary results from the survey figured into one of our fact checks earlier this year. Final survey results are now compiled, Donna Kinney, the association’s lead researcher, told us by phone. Kinney said the results break out to 32 percent of Texas physicians saying they accept all new Medicaid patients and 42 percent declining all new Medicaid patients--with 26 percent limiting their new Medicaid patients. Put another way, the final results indicate that about four in 10 Texas physicians decline all new Medicaid patients while about six in 10 accept at least some new patients. ""They may accept them only in the emergency room,"" Kinney speculated. ""The limits could be anything."" Early this year, we rated the association’s claim that only 31 percent of Texas physicians accept all new Medicaid patients, compared with 67 percent in 2000. The group’s Twitter post about the figure was missing clarification that the figure came from a survey. At the time, though, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission told us that some 67 percent of the state’s physicians had accepted Medicaid at least once during a recent 12-month period. Agency spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman told us by email that 34,290 Texas physicians had claims paid by Medicaid in the fiscal year that ran through August 2011. According to the Texas Medical Board, there were nearly 51,000 practicing physicians in the state at about that time. Goodman said then that she did not have information on the share of physicians not accepting all new Medicaid patients. Brent Annear, a medical association spokesman, guided us to a March 2012 web post by the group stating that 27,917 physicians and medical residents were asked to fill out its online survey and the group fielded 1,139 responses, a 4 percent response rate. The group’s ""preliminary findings"" document says the respondents were a ""representative sample"" of all physicians. The survey reached members and non-members, Kinney told us by email. The key question lists physician reimbursement methods including private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. ""For patients covered by the following payers,"" the question says, ""does your practice currently (1) accept all new patients, (2) limit new patients that you will accept, or (3) accept no new patients?"" According to the final results, Kinney said, 32 percent said they accept all new Medicaid patients. Some 26 percent said they limit their new Medicaid patients, and 42 percent said they decline all new Medicaid patients, compared with 32 percent in 2010. For our previous check, Annear said by email that physicians have difficulties with Medicaid’s rates and bureaucratic hurdles that delay payments. The rates decreased four times from 2000 to 2011, an association spokeswoman, Pam Udall, said by email, though the state also agreed to a 25-percent boost in funds covering certain physician services provided to children on Medicaid, as part of resolving a lawsuit. We asked Kinney to speculate on why nearly 70 percent of Texas physicians submitted at least one Medicaid claim in a recent year. She said about 60 percent of the state’s physicians--including many specialists in radiology, pathology and anesthesiology--must accept Medicaid to maintain their hospital admitting privileges. Those kinds of doctors would have responded to the survey by saying they limit new Medicaid patients, she said by phone. For a ""real-world"" take, we ran the preliminary survey result by Austin opthalmologist Michelle Berger, the 2013 president of the Travis County Medical Society, which is affiliated with the medical association. Berger said by phone that the society frequently fields inquiries from individuals newly on Medicaid seeking a doctor. Berger said she stopped accepting new Medicaid patients in her practice because related paperwork proved onerous and government payments, which have not kept up with inflation, were not quickly forthcoming. Then again, she said, doctors who do not accept new Medicaid patients may still provide charity care--the result being that some low-income patients are served even though their doctors do not seek payment. Asked to appraise the Texas leaders’ declaration--that only three in 10 physicians accept new Medicaid patients--Kinney said: ""The language does matter. They should have said ‘all’"" new patients. In emails, Perry spokesman Josh Havens and Cornyn spokeswoman Jessica Sandlin each said the leaders’ statement accurately reflected the association survey. Havens added that ""you cannot continue to add context to manipulate the result you want."" Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier, also standing by the claim, said by email that the point is that Medicaid is a broken system. Our ruling Perry said only three in 10 Texas doctors currently accept new Medicaid patients. In a recent year, some 67 percent of Texas physicians submitted at least one Medicaid claim. More recently, 42 percent of the state’s physicians responding to a 2012 survey said they refuse all new Medicaid patients. Then again, 32 percent said they accept all new Medicaid patients and 26 percent said they limit such patients--signaling that 58 percent of physicians accept at least some new Medicaid patients. By not specifying that the cited ""three in 10"" reflects only doctors who accept all new Medicaid patients, Perry’s statement falls off target by nearly 30 percent. Still, it has en element of truth." Claim: Only three in 10 Texas doctors are currently accepting new Medicaid patients.

SOLUTION:
0