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: According to the Maine Center for Disease Control, the number of syphilis cases reported in the state increased from 48 in 2016 to 84 last year. The number of national syphilis cases increased by 18 percent in between 2015 and 2016. Maine Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman tells the Bangor Daily News the department isn’t sure why syphilis has increased in recent years. Portland Public Health Center medical director Dr. Christina DeMatteo believes opioid use and waning concerns about HIV have contributed to attitudes about having unprotected sex. Public health advocates say budget cuts resulting in changes in prevention and treatment have also affected rates in the state. ___ Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangordailynews.com Claim: Maine sees increase in reported syphilis cases.

Ex Output:
Public health officials in Maine say there has been an increase in syphilis cases, mirroring a national trend.


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: A paper published last week by researchers at the University of Colorado concluded that the wastewater caused a big enough increase in underground pressure to make rock formations slip along fault lines. “You find that the pressure changes at a given depth are enough to trigger earthquakes,” said Jenny Nakai, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral student at the university. The paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, is the latest to link wastewater injection wells to earthquakes. Most oil and gas wells produce at least some wastewater that is too salty to use, so regulators allow energy companies to pump it back underground to get rid of it. Researchers have linked earthquakes in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas to wastewater injection. Oklahoma had only a few dozen earthquakes of magnitude-3.0 or greater in 2012 but had more than 900 in 2015. The number dropped to closer to 600 last year after state regulators directed energy companies to close some injection wells or reduce the volume of water they inject. In the Raton Basin of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, earthquakes began to increase in 2001, about two years after large-scale wastewater injection began, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The wastewater comes from wells that extract natural gas from underground coal beds. The biggest quake in the basin since 2001 was magnitude-5.3 in 2011. It caused minor damage to buildings in Trinidad, Colorado, about 15 miles from the epicenter. A 2014 paper by the Geological Survey blamed injection wells for the area’s quakes. The new University of Colorado study went further, using computer models and records of wastewater injection to conclude that enough pressure built up to cause the quakes. Justin Rubinstein, a geophysicist with the Geological Survey who was the lead author of the 2014 paper, said the computer models have been used in other locations but not in the Raton Basin before now. Rubinstein was not involved in the University of Colorado study and said he was not familiar with all its details but that the general conclusions made sense. “It’s consistent with what my research has shown,” he said. The University of Colorado study also found that the Raton Basin earthquakes were more widespread than previously thought, said Nakai, the lead author. Earlier studies focused on the Colorado portion of the basin because that was the site of a 2001 swarm of 12 quakes — the strongest was magnitude-4.6 — as well as the 5.3 quake in 2011. But seismometers recorded 1,881 quakes in the area between 2008 and 2010, and 1,442 of them were in New Mexico, Nakai said. The strongest was magnitude-3.8. The 2008-2010 data came from a temporary deployment of seismometers as part of two other research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, Nakai said. ___ Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/dan%20elliott . ___ This story has been corrected to show that the U.S. Geological Survey was misidentified as the U.S. Geological Service. Claim: Study: More evidence links earthquakes to energy waste wells.

Ex Output:

Scientists say they have more evidence that an increase in earthquakes on the Colorado-New Mexico border since 2001 has been caused by wells that inject wastewater from oil and gas production back underground, similar to human-caused quakes in Oklahoma and other states.