TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: "In his address to a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama brought up the most explosive charge to emerge in the health care debate: the specter of ""death panels."" ""Some of people’s concerns (about the health care legislation) have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost,"" Obama told lawmakers and a national television audience on Sept. 9, 2009. ""The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but by prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Now, such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple."" The president was referring to a notion most prominently raised by former Alaska Republican Gov. Sarah Palin in a note posted on her Facebook page on Aug. 7, 2009. ""And who will suffer the most when they ration care?"" Palin wrote. ""The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."" We have read all 1,000-plus pages of the Democratic bill and examined versions in various committees. There is no panel in any version of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person's ""level of productivity in society"" to determine whether someone is ""worthy"" of health care. When we first  assessed  Palin's claim on Aug. 7, 2009, we gave it our lowest rating — . Palin may have jumped to a conclusion about the Obama administration's efforts to promote comparative effectiveness research. Such research has nothing to do with evaluating patients for ""worthiness."" Rather, comparative effectiveness research finds out which treatments work better than others. The health reform bill being considered in the House of Representatives says that a Comparative Effectiveness Research Center shall ""conduct, support, and synthesize research"" that looks at ""outcomes, effectiveness, and appropriateness of health care services and procedures in order to identify the manner in which diseases, disorders, and other health conditions can most effectively and appropriately be prevented, diagnosed, treated, and managed clinically."" The idea here, which Obama and his budget director Peter Orszag have discussed many times, is to make it easier for doctors, health care workers, insurance companies and patients to find out which treatments are the most effective, as determined by clinical studies and other research. The House bill states in the section creating the Comparative Effectiveness Research Center and an oversight commission that ""nothing in this section shall be consd to permit the Commission or the Center to mandate coverage, reimbursement, or other policies for any public or private payer."" In other words, comparative effectiveness research will tell you whether treatment A is better than treatment B. But the bill as written won't mandate which treatment doctors and patients have to select. Nothing has emerged to suggest to us that the death panels claim is any more  today than it was when Palin first floated it. We still rate it as  today. In our book, that counts as a ""lie, plain and simple."" So we find Obama's claim ."

SOLUTION: The claim ... that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to  kill off senior citizens ... is a lie, plain and simple.

PROBLEM: "Anyone who follows the constant drum beat of crime news in metro Atlanta might not be surprised by a new study that puts Georgia among the most dangerous states for a very specific crime: women who are murdered by men. A Violence Policy Center report released in September shows Georgia ranks ninth among all states, with a homicide rate of 1.66 per 100,000 women in 2012, the last year data is available. The national rate is 1.16 per 100,000. ""We call on Georgia’s lawmakers to make it an urgent priority to keep guns away from domestic abusers and protect women from harm,"" Kathryn Grant, co-founder of GunSense Georgia said in a statement related to the study. ""This is literally a matter of life and death."" PolitiFact Georgia wanted to know if our state really ranks that high on the list for women murdered by men. We went straight to the website for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. That data showed Georgia had 102 homicides in 2012 – 19 percent more than the 84 tallied in the Violence Policy Center report. The VPC’s study has a lower overall number because it takes that data and then weeds out crimes with more than one victim or perpetrator, said VPC policy analyst Marty Langley, who authored the report. An analysis of the SHR data, available only in hard copy from the FBI, confirms those numbers are accurate for incidents where one woman is killed by one man. James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminology professor who has studied and analyzed such data for decades, said the adjustment oversimplifies the information. Taking a more narrow slice of victims also allows for further analysis of their characteristics such as age (the victim in Georgia was 38) and race (51 were black and 30 were white in Georgia). And for homicides where the data could be found, 69 percent of victims were killed with guns and 93 percent of them were murdered by someone they knew, the study found. ""An overarching point we want to make with this study is that it’s a myth that a woman’s risk of homicide comes from being attacked by a stranger,"" said Kristen Rand, the group’s legislative director. ""The risk of stranger homicide is really quite low."" But missing from the report is another key fact: the risk of homicide in Georgia is among the highest for any victims. It’s easier to see in lists:  Rank State 2012 Homicide Rate per 100,000, Females Murdered by Males 1 Alaska 2.57 2 South Carolina 2.06 3 Oklahoma 2.03 4 Louisiana 1.92 5 Mississippi 1.89 6 Nevada 1.83 7 Missouri 1.73 8 Arizona 1.70 9 Georgia 1.66 10 Tennessee 1.60 (Source: Violence Policy Center)  Rank State 2012 Homicide Rate per 100,000, Overall 1 Louisiana 10.8 2 Mississippi 7.4 3 Alabama 7.1 4 Michigan 7.0 5 South Carolina 6.9 6 Missouri 6.5 7 Maryland 6.3 8 Delaware 6.2 9 Tennessee 6.0 10 (tie) Arkansas, Georgia 5.9 (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics)  Southern states such as Georgia dominate both lists, Fox said, because of factors beyond gender. Gun ownership rates are higher here. The South also has a long history of  people solving personal conflicts with violence versus lawsuits, Fox said. And, he added, the region is also more diverse than much of the country, and murder rates by and against blacks are higher than those among whites. ""The fact that most of the states on (the VPC) list are in the south is not so much an issue of male-female violence,"" Fox said. ""It’s about homicide, generally."" In summary, the data bears out the study’s findings that rank Georgia ninth in the nation for the rate of women killed by men. One caveat is that tally counts only single victims and perpetrators. It ignores some crimes it hopes to draw attention to, such as a former partner killing a woman before committing suicide or a man killing his ex-partner and a new love interest, if there are two victims. More importantly, the tally also fails to acknowledge Georgia’s dismal rank for the risk of homicide overall, and the other factors that contribute to it. The numbers are right, but it’s also  that there is more to the story."

SOLUTION: Georgia ranks No. 9 in the rate of women murdered by men.

PROBLEM: The Idaho State Journal reports that last year there were nearly 6,600 STD cases, including HIV, up from fewer than 6,300 in 2016. Cases are also up nationally, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announcing last week that nearly 2.3 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were diagnosed in the United States in 2017. Kimberly Matulonis-Edgar of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare says experts in the state and across the country are struggling to understand what’s driving the increase. The most prevalent STDs reported nationally and in Idaho are gonorrhea and chlamydia. State health officials say that the rate of reported gonorrhea cases in Southeast Idaho fell about 14 percent from a year ago, but jumped more than 200 percent in south-central Idaho. ___ Information from: Idaho State Journal, http://www.journalnet.com

SOLUTION:
Health experts alarmed by jump in STDs in Idaho.