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.

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.
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.

Paragraph: The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics said Thursday that the number of U.S. babies born last year fell 2 percent from 2016 to 3.85 million, also a 30-year low. Births have fallen for three straight years. The fertility rate dropped 3 percent last year to 60.2 births per 1,000 women ages 15 through 44. An aging society has already weighed on economic growth in the United States in the past decade, with the vast baby boom generation retiring and fewer young people replacing them. Thursday’s data suggests that the trend is likely to continue. Economic growth is generally driven by population growth and worker efficiency, both of which have slowed in the past decade in the United States. Kathy Bostjancic, an economist at Oxford Economics, a consulting firm, said that roughly 10 years ago, the number of Americans working or looking for work was growing about 1 percent annually. With birthrates declining, that figure has since fallen to about a 0.3 percent growth rate. That essentially acts as a 0.7 percentage point drag on the United States’ long-run growth. “Demographics have a really powerful impact on the economy,” Bostjancic said. The U.S. economy has grown at a 3 percent average annual rate since World War II. Yet it hasn’t reached that pace for a full calendar year since 2005. The baby boomers first reached retirement age in 2008. The Federal Reserve in March upgraded its short-term economic growth forecast to about 2.7 percent for this year and 2.4 percent in 2019, partly because of the Trump administration’s tax cuts. But the Fed kept its longer-run annual growth forecast at just 1.8 percent, reflecting the demographic headwinds. Aside from fewer workers, an aging society can hold back growth because fewer people are buying homes, cars and other costly purchases. Savings generally rise as people age and prepare for retirement. And as elderly people live longer, they also slow their spending while in retirement, Bostjancic noted. Most economists attribute the low interest rates and low inflation of the past decade, in the United States, Europe and Japan, at least in part to aging. In Japan, where adult diapers outsell those for children, the impact of fewer births has kept growth nearly nonexistent for more than two decades. The economy has picked up recently and enjoyed two straight years of growth, the longest such streak since the late 1980s, before contracting again in the first three months of this year. The U.S. accepts many more immigrants than does Japan, and that influx has boosted population growth. The Labor Department released separate data Thursday showing that last year, there were 27.4 million foreign-born workers in the United States, the most since records began in 2005. Immigrants now make up 17.1 percent of the U.S. workforce. Economic research earlier this year found that U.S. fertility fell sharply roughly nine months before the past three recessions. That suggests that such declines could signal economic downturns. But Kasey Buckles, an economics professor at Notre Dame who conducted the research with two colleagues, said that recent such declines aren’t sharp enough to point to a recession. Instead, she noted that fertility declines over the past three years have occurred mostly among women under 30. Birth rates among older women have risen or held steady. That suggests that the fertility declines largely reflect a drop in unwanted pregnancies since the 2008-2009 recession. Fertility among women of all ages fell sharply in 2008 and 2009, Buckles said, but rebounded quickly for women 30 and over. Separate data from the Guttmacher Institute, a policy organization that tracks reproductive health, shows that unwanted pregnancies have fallen since the Great Recession, Buckles said. “It’s possible that the Great Recession may have been something of a triggering event that caused people to be more intentional about their fertility,” she said. ___ Contact Chris Rugaber on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/ChrisRugaber . Claim: Lowest US birth rate in 3 decades could pose risk to economy.
Women in the United States gave birth last year at the lowest rate in 30 years, a trend that could weigh on economic growth in the coming decades.

Paragraph: The Emmy- and Tony-award-winning actress is in Ann Arbor, Michigan, this week for a gathering designed to bring awareness to efforts aimed at reducing the stigma associated with mental illness. “I’m excited about every aspect of this event. I think for those of us who are coming in to participate it’s very exciting, because I really look forward to talking to the students and learning about what they’re dealing with,” Close told The Associated Press during an interview Thursday at the University of Michigan. “There’s a lot of anxiety, depression, and stigma on campuses. I think kids are really, really open and ready to talk about it.” Close, NFL player Brandon Marshall, rapper/singer Logic and others are visiting the campus to show support for the Steven Schwartzberg Foundation, which is launching a campaign to empower students to address issues of mental health by encouraging conversations. The campaign is called “Who Can Relate?” It takes its name from a line in Logic’s hit song “1-800-273-8255,” named for the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Lyrics from Logic’s song include: “I don’t wanna be alive/I just wanna die today,” and “I want you to be alive/You don’t got to die today.” Logic is scheduled to perform Friday night with profits going to organizations that share the same goal of de-stigmatizing mental illness, including Close’s Bring Change to Mind, which she co-founded after her sister was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and her nephew with schizoaffective disorder. Also benefiting from the show will be Project375, which was founded by Marshall and his wife, Michi Marshall, after the star wide receiver was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Michi Marshall spent much of Thursday leading a mental health first-aid training session. Close stopped in to check out the training and also attended a lecture by artist and social activist Peter Tunney. The event was created by Harris Schwartzberg, who sits on the board of Bring Change to Mind and is an advisory board member of the University of Michigan’s Comprehensive Depression Center. The Steven Schwartzberg Foundation is named for Harris Schwartzberg’s brother, who died after a long struggle with bipolar disorder. “Glenn is a person and Brandon’s a person, and they struggle and their families struggle. And it should set a great example for people to come out and speak. And that’s really the most inspiring is that they’re willing to risk their public platform to spread the message it’s that important,” Schwartzberg said. Claim: Actress Glenn Close aims to reduce mental health stigma.

Actress Glenn Close says she wants to live in a world where mental illness is talked about openly and accepted as a fact of life.