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.
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Question: In November 2018, the “Weird Facts” Facebook page posted a widely-shared meme which outlined the death of Joyce Carol Vincent, summarizing it as “In 2006, a woman (Joyce Carol Vincent) was found in her London flat, skeletonized, after 3 years of being dead — with the TV still running”:  Notwithstanding the somewhat crass imagery used in the meme, this was unfortunately a largely accurate description of the tragic circumstances surrounding the death of Joyce Carol Vincent, who did indeed remain undiscovered at home for around two years, dying around December 2003. According to material prepared for release to the news media by the Metropolitan Police, as well as reports by the BBC and the Press Association, the following are the known facts surrounding Vincent’s demise. Some readers might find the details disturbing. On 26 January 2006, Vincent’s remains were discovered at her apartment in Wood Green, north-east London. Workers from the Metropolitan Housing Trust, an organization which provides affordable housing and is now known as Metropolitan Thames Valley, had forced entry while attempting to inquire about thousands of pounds of unpaid rent arrears. Vincent had been placed in the small apartment as part of a scheme for victims of domestic violence. Vincent’s remains were badly decomposed, and pathologist Dr. Simon Poole later described them as being “largely skeletal,” which supports the claim made in the “Weird Facts” meme. According to evidence heard at a coroner’s inquest, Vincent was found lying on her back on the floor of her living room next to a shopping bag and Christmas presents which she had wrapped but never delivered. Her television was indeed still switched on when Vincent was found. She was identified by reference to dental records. Based on the expiration dates of food and medication found in Vincent’s flat, it was estimated that she had died around December 2003, some two years earlier — not three years earlier, as the “Weird Facts” meme and several news reports mistakenly stated. She was born in London to Grenadian immigrant parents in 1965, and was 38 years old at the time of her death. In the years after Vincent was discovered, the filmmaker Carol Morley tracked down her friends, colleagues and associates. In interviews which would ultimately form the basis of the 2011 documentary film Dreams of a Life, those who knew Vincent universally recalled their shock and disbelief at the circumstances of her death and discovery. In the film some friends recounted actually having read news accounts of her death in April 2006, but without an accompanying photograph, they did not connect the horrific circumstances of her discovery with the person they had known. According to those accounts, Vincent had for many years been a very social, popular professional young woman who worked in London’s fast-paced financial district in the 1980s and 1990s, was highly intelligent and charming, and was remarkably attractive and frequently the object of male attention. Vincent, who was at one time an aspiring singer, was acquainted with the soul vocalist Betty Wright, and had dinner with other iconic musical artists, including Gil Scott-Heron, Jimmy Cliff, and Ben E. King. In 1990, Vincent briefly met and conversed with Nelson Mandela backstage at a concert in London’s Wembley Stadium. Although she had many friends, Vincent’s friendships appear to have been somewhat fleeting, and despite the deep affection in which she was held, she was known for “drifting” in and out of social groups and relationships and sometimes appeared troubled. Her acquaintances recalled that she was distant towards her family members. According to Morley’s interviews with friends of Vincent, she became engaged to marry an unidentified man in the late 1990s, and the Metropolitan Police later noted that she had been involved in a “domestic incident” in 1998. In Morley’s documentary, Vincent’s friends observed that she was likely to have been in at least one abusive relationship during that time. By 2001, Vincent left her job at the accounting firm Ernst & Young and progressively lost contact with her family members, friends and former colleagues, working for a time as a cleaner. She changed addresses frequently but moved into her final apartment in Wood Green in February 2003, having been placed there as part of a women’s refuge program for victims of domestic violence. Her friends have speculated that she may have become isolated and withdrawn over time because she was ashamed of the abuse she had suffered and the shift in her professional and personal circumstances, and she may also have been avoiding detection by an abusive former partner. In November 2003, she was briefly hospitalized after vomiting blood and was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer. Although she is believed to have died around a month later, the coroner was unable to arrive at a cause of death due to the decomposition of her remains by January 2006. She also suffered from asthma, which was cited by her friends as a possible cause of death.

Answer: In 2006, the skeletal remains of Joyce Carol Vincent were found in her home, with the television on, years after her death. 


Question: Nguyen’s suicide has sparked a contentious legal battle headed to Massachusetts’ highest court over whether schools can be held responsible when students take their own lives. The case is being closely watched by colleges and universities, who say a decision against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would place an unreasonable burden on untrained employees to stop suicides. “It would be groundbreaking,” said Gary Pavela, a consultant on law and policy issues in higher education and author of a book about legal questions surrounding student suicides. “It would cause alarm in higher education,” he said. The student’s family says his death was preventable and that the school had a legal duty to use reasonable care to protect him from harm. Nguyen’s professors and other MIT officials knew he was a suicide risk, but failed to get him the help he needed, an attorney for Nguyen’s family argues. Months before Nguyen’s death, a professor encouraged his colleagues to pass him or they might have “blood on their hands.” Moments before Nguyen jumped, the professor “read him the riot act” over an email Nguyen sent to another MIT official that they deemed inappropriate, court records say. “Academic freedom is not a license to needlessly and recklessly endanger students known to be at risk of death with impunity; and this court should not allow it to become one at institutions that routinely admit students — many with mental health issues — as young as their mid-teens,” attorney Jeffrey Beeler wrote in court documents. Beeler declined to comment and said Nguyen’s family didn’t want to speak to the media. MIT says the school wasn’t aware of the severity of his condition and he was treated by outside professionals and refused on-campus resources. None of the nine professionals who treated Nguyen while he was at MIT believed he was an imminent risk of killing himself, the school says. “Mr. Nguyen’s suicide was a tragedy. That does not warrant a legal conclusion that MIT or any individual associated with MIT had a legal duty to prevent it,” attorneys for the school, two professors and one dean named in the lawsuit say in court documents. MIT, which refused to answer questions about the case, said in a statement it “remains committed to the well-being of its students, offering a robust network of support resources, including comprehensive mental health services.” Nguyen’s family attorney disputes the idea that the man didn’t want help and has accused MIT of blaming the victim. No state supreme court has ever found that colleges and universities have a legal duty to prevent student suicides, MIT’s attorneys say. Courts have generally been reluctant to do so because, among other things, suicide is an impulsive act that’s difficult to predict, Pavela said. A Massachusetts trial court judge ruled in 2005 that an MIT housemaster and dean could be held responsible for the death of a woman who lit herself on fire in her dorm room. But Elizabeth Shin’s case, which was later settled for an undisclosed amount, never reached the state’s highest court. The Supreme Judicial Court will hear arguments in Nguyen’s case on Tuesday after a lower court judge tossed the lawsuit last year. A group of 18 colleges and universities — including Harvard University and Boston College — is urging the court to reject the case, saying a decision in favor of the family could have devastating consequences. Fear of liability may cause professors and others without mental health expertise to overreact to concerns, which in turn could discourage students from coming forward with their problems, the schools say. Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a psychiatry expert at Columbia University, agrees. “To the extent that you heighten every resident assistant’s sensitivity to the risk of suicidality, with the threat of liability hanging over them, they are far more likely to over predict, over intervene, see it where it’s not,” Appelbaum said. The Nguyen family attorney and their supporters — including the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys — say the schools’ concerns are baseless. Beeler, in his filing, said he merely wants the court to affirm that the duty to provide reasonable care “extends to the ivory tower as it does every other civilized corner of the Commonwealth.” Thomas Murphy, chair of the amicus committee of the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys, says a jury should get to decide whether MIT was negligent and caused Nguyen’s suicide. “Maybe the school can convince them that they didn’t cause (Nguyen’s suicide) and it was going to happen anyway,” he said. ___ Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://twitter.com/aedurkinricher. Read more of her work at http://bit.ly/2hIhzDb

Answer: Case stirs question of school liability for student suicides.


Question: The populist rhetoric appears to be giving way to a more nuanced strategy focused on making the pharmaceutical market more open and competitive, with the aim of lowering costs for consumers. It’s an approach that could avoid a direct confrontation with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, but it could also underwhelm Americans seeking relief from escalating prescription costs. On Friday, Trump is scheduled to give his first speech on an overarching plan to lower drug prices. Administration officials previewing the speech Thursday touted it as the most comprehensive plan to tackle prescription drug costs that any president has ever proposed, but offered few specifics. Officials said the plan would increase competition, create incentives for drugmakers to lower initial prices and slash federal rules that make it harder for private insurers to negotiate lower prices. The result would be lower pharmacy costs for patients — a key Trump campaign promise. The plan will not include giving the federal Medicare program power to directly negotiate prices with drugmakers, they noted. Trump campaigned on the idea, which is vigorously opposed by the pharmaceutical industry. Public outrage over drug costs has been growing for years, because Americans are being squeezed in a number of ways: New medicines for cancer and other life-threatening diseases often launch with prices exceeding $100,000 per year. Drugs for common ailments like diabetes and asthma routinely see price hikes around 10 percent annually. Meanwhile some companies have been buying up once-cheap older drugs and hiking prices by 1,000 percent or more. Since entering the White House, Trump has backed away from reforms directly targeting drugmakers and staffed his administration with appointees who have deep ties to the industry, including his health secretary, Alex Azar, a former top executive at Eli Lilly. Still, administration officials ratcheted up the rhetoric ahead of Trump’s speech. Azar promised bold action. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb — another Trump appointee with industry connections — hinted at a plan to “dismantle” the convoluted system of discounts and rebates between drugmakers and health care middlemen. On Thursday, administration officials also vowed to address foreign governments that rely on U.S. medicines but pay drastically lower prices due to government controls. The U.S. accounts for 70 percent of the world’s brand-name drug profits, according to a White House report released earlier this year. Here are some of the drivers of U.S. prescription drug prices, proposals for reducing the costs and what’s at stake: LACK OF REGULATION Drugmakers generally can charge as much as the market will bear because the U.S. government doesn’t regulate medicine prices, unlike most other countries. Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the nation, covering 60 million seniors and Americans with disabilities, but it is barred by law from directly negotiating lower prices with drugmakers. Democrats have long favored giving Medicare that power, but Republicans traditionally oppose the idea. The powerful pharmaceutical lobby has repeatedly fended off proposals that could lower prices, such as Medicare negotiations or importing drugs from countries that regulate pricing. With no direct government price regulation, the primary check on prices comes from buyers in bulk — such as insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers, which handle prescription coverage for insurers, employers and other big clients. But because there are so many players in the fragmented system, the discounts achieved in the U.S. are generally far more modest than those in other countries. The result is that the U.S. spends more on medicines than any other nation. In 2015, the U.S. spent $1,162 per person on pharmaceuticals, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That compares with $756 for Canada and $497 for the United Kingdom, both of which have government measures to control drug prices. LACK OF TRANSPARENCY The U.S. system for pricing drugs is notoriously complex, so much that the “real” price for most medicines isn’t clear. Critics contend that this lack of transparency limits competition and drives prices higher. Pharmaceutical companies often launch their drugs with high initial prices. But they argue list prices are merely a starting point for negotiations because they give substantial rebates and discounts to pharmacy benefit managers. Those price concessions are almost never disclosed and it’s unclear what portion actually flows back to consumers. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and others say the lack of transparency in the current system creates perverse incentives in which drugmakers and other health care companies benefit from rising prices — at the expense of patients. Trump officials have suggested requiring Medicare pharmacy benefit managers to share rebate payments with patients. Another proposal would do away with rebates altogether to encourage more upfront discounts in Medicare. But the benefit managers and insurers say that they use rebates to lower health care premiums overall and that doing away with them would drive up costs. PATENTS AND ANTI-COMPETITIVE TACTICS Patents last longer in the U.S. than most countries, typically giving companies a dozen years of competition-free marketing after a drug launches. Most drugmakers increase their prices annually during this monopoly period, and until recently double-digit price hikes were the norm. Drugmakers also have developed a number of techniques to block competitors from launching lower-cost generic drugs. Companies often tweak drug formulations to extend their patents. In other cases, companies directly pay would-be competitors to stay off the market in so-called “pay-to-delay” deals. Gottlieb has promised a crackdown on some of these techniques used to “game the system.” He’s highlighted a practice in which drugmakers use tightly controlled distribution systems to prevent rival manufacturers from purchasing their drug. This effectively blocks the development of generic versions because generic drugmakers must test their products against the original medicine before they can win FDA approval. PUBLIC PERCEPTION A majority of Americans say bringing down prescription drug prices should be a “top priority” for Trump and Congress, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And experts who study drug pricing say it’s encouraging that the discussion around the issue has moved from outrage to sophisticated reforms. But some warn there is no guarantee that unraveling the current pricing-setting bureaucracy will lead to lower prices, because it all starts with drugmakers’ prices. “Until we get closer to policy solutions that address the ability of drug manufacturers to set whatever price they want and increase prices year after year we may only be scratching the surface of this problem,” said Juliette Cubanski, a health care expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Dan Mendelson, a health care consultant, said: “If they don’t address the cost that patients see at the pharmacy counter it’s not going to be seen as responsive.” ___ AP Health Writer Tom Murphy contributed to this report. ___ The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Answer:
In taking on high drug prices, Trump faces a complex nemesis.