Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.

Ex Input:
Paragraph: That’s among the findings of the America’s Health Rankings Senior Report released in May by the United Health Foundation. The report ranks the 50 states by assessing data covering individual behavior, the environment and communities where seniors live, local health policy and clinical care. Minnesota took top honors for the second year in a row, ranking high for everything from the rate of annual dental visits, volunteerism, high percentage of quality nursing-home beds and low percentage of food insecurity. This year’s runners-up are Hawaii, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. The researchers base their rankings on 34 measures of health. But here’s one you won’t find in the report: state compliance with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the health reform law isn’t mainly about seniors, it has one important feature that can boost the health of lower-income older people: the expansion of Medicaid. The ACA aims to expand health insurance coverage for low-income Americans through broadened Medicaid eligibility, with the federal government picking up 100 percent of the tab for the first three years (2014-2016) and no less than 90 percent after that. But when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the ACA’s legality in 2012, it made the Medicaid expansion optional, and 21 states have rejected the expansion for ideological or fiscal reasons. And guess what: Most of the states with the worst senior health report cards also rejected the Medicaid expansion. Nearly all Americans over age 65 are covered by Medicare. But the Medicaid expansion also is a key lever for improving senior health because it extends coverage to older people who haven’t yet become eligible for Medicare. That means otherwise uninsured low-income seniors are able to get medical care in the years leading up to age 65 - and they are healthier when they arrive at Medicare’s doorstep. Two studies from non-partisan reports verify this. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported late last year that seniors who had continuous health insurance coverage in the six years before enrolling in Medicare used fewer and less costly medical services during their first six years in the program; in their first year of Medicare enrollment, they had 35 percent lower average total spending. The GAO study confirmed the findings of a 2009 study report by two researchers at the Harvard Medical School. That study looked at individuals who were continuously or intermittently uninsured between age 51 and 64; these patients cost Medicare an additional $1,000 per person due mainly to complications from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and delayed surgeries for arthritis. Fifty-two percent of Medicaid-rejecting states ranked in the study’s bottom third for senior health, including two very large states, Texas and Florida. Many of these states also can be found in a list of states with the highest rates of poverty among people over 65. What emerges is a north-south divide on senior health. “Many states that haven’t expanded Medicaid are in the South, and there’s a clear link between socioeconomic status and health status,” says Tricia Neuman, senior vice-president at the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation and director of the foundation’s Medicare policy program. “Insurance may not be the only answer, but it certainly is helpful.”  The United Health Foundation - a non-profit funded by the insurer UnitedHealth Group - didn’t consider insurance coverage in its study, but it did consider poverty. Minnesota’s rate was 5.4 percent - well below the 9.3 percent national rate. Mississippi ranked dead last, with a 13.5 percent poverty rate. In states that rejected the Medicaid expansion, we are witnessing a victory of politics over compassion and morality. Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a key architect of health reform in Massachusetts and under the ACA, summed it up in an interview with HealthInsurance.org earlier this year, saying that these states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.” Claim: The state of senior health: It depends on your state.

Ex Output:
What are the best and worst places to stay healthy as you age? For answers, take out a map and follow the Mississippi River from north to south. The healthiest people over 65 are in Minnesota, the sickest in Mississippi.


Ex Input:
Paragraph: Attorney and Democratic state Sen. Jacob Candelaria recently filed a lawsuit in state district court on behalf of Joe Montano, who said authorities recently seized his medical cannabis, KOAT-TV reports. According to court documents, correctional officers searched Montano’s home while he was on house arrest, found the marijuana, and put him in jail for a month as punishment. The petition is seeking a judge to order the jail to allow him to possess and use his medical marijuana. State lawmakers passed a measure last year to allow people on house arrest to use medical marijuana. In a statement, Metropolitan Detention Center Chief of Corrections Ralph Fernadez said Community Custody Program inmates are considered in jail custody, and medical marijuana use is prohibited in the detention center. Claim: New Mexico man in house arrest sues to use medical marijuana.

Ex Output:
A New Mexico man serving a house arrest sentence for drunken driving is suing to be allowed to use medical marijuana.


Ex Input:
Paragraph: The plague outbreak has killed 63 people in the Indian Ocean island nation, Madagascar’s government says. For the first time, the disease long seen in the country’s remote areas is largely concentrated in its two largest cities, Antananarivo and Toamasina. Global health officials have responded quickly. The World Health Organization, criticized for its slow response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, has released $1.5 million and sent plague specialists and epidemiologists. The Red Cross is sending its first-ever plague treatment center to Madagascar. On Wednesday, Madagascar’s minister of public health rallied doctors and paramedics in a packed auditorium at the country’s main hospital, saying they’re not allowed to go on vacation. “Let’s be strong, because it’s only us. We’re at the front, like the military,” Mamy Lalatiana Andriamanarivo said. The outbreak could continue until the end of infection season in April, experts warn. Madagascar has about 400 plague cases per year, or more than half of the world’s total, according to a 2016 World Health Organization report. Usually, they are cases of bubonic plague in the rural highlands. Bubonic plague is carried by rats and spread to humans through flea bites. It is fatal about the half the time, if untreated. Most of the cases in the current outbreak are pneumonic plague, a more virulent form that spreads through coughing, sneezing or spitting and is almost always fatal if untreated. In some cases, it can kill within 24 hours. Like the bubonic form, it can be treated with common antibiotics if caught in time. The WHO calls plague a “disease of poverty” caused in part by unsanitary living conditions. Madagascar has a per capita GDP of about $400, and national programs to control the disease have been “hampered by operational and management difficulties,” according to a report by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. But the airborne pneumonic plague, which accounts for about 75 percent of cases in the current outbreak, makes no class distinctions. “Normally, the people who catch the plague are dirty people who live in poor areas, but in this case we find the well-to-do, the directors, the professors, people in every place in society, catching the disease,” said Dr. Manitra Rakotoarivony, Madagascar’s director of health promotion. The current outbreak began in August, earlier than usual, when a 31-year-old man who had spent time in a village in the central highlands, Ankazobe, traveled by bush taxi to the east coast, unaware that he had the plague. He died en route and was buried without any safety precautions in Toamasina. Four people in contact with him also died. Residents of the capital began to relax in recent days amid the global response to the outbreak, but the disease remains a serious threat with the number of new cases per day remaining steady. Madagascar has fought the disease for more than a century. It was introduced to the island in 1898 when steamships from India brought rats infected with the bacteria that causes the disease. The plague nearly disappeared from Madagascar for 60 years, starting in 1930, but re-emerged in recent decades. The black rats that carry the disease in the highlands have gradually developed resistance to it. Unsafe burial practices that involve touching corpses are another reason the disease spreads, according to a 2015 study by scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Madagascar. The outbreak has alarmed neighboring countries. A 34-year-old man in another Indian Ocean island nation, the Seychelles, contracted the pneumonic plague while in Madagascar. He was treated in his own country and no longer has symptoms. It was the first-ever plague case in the Seychelles, said the country’s public health commissioner, Dr. Jude Gedeon. Another Seychellois, a 49-year-old basketball coach, died of the plague last month while in Antananarivo for a tournament. Seychelles authorities have established a plague isolation ward and announced that schools will be closed through Tuesday. Foreign travelers who have recently visited Madagascar are not being allowed into the country. While the WHO says the risk of the epidemic spreading beyond the region is very low and does not advise restrictions on travel to Madagascar, Air Seychelles has canceled all flights to and from the island until further notice. “The situation is still not under control in Madagascar,” Gedeon said. Claim: In Madagascar, plague outbreak now threatens largest cities.

Ex Output:

As plague cases rose last week in Madagascar’s capital, many city dwellers panicked. They waited in long lines for antibiotics at pharmacies and reached through bus windows to buy masks from street vendors. Schools have been canceled, and public gatherings are banned.