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.

Example Input: Paragraph: "Patients used to pay $10,000 a year for cancer drugs, but now they’re paying $10,000 a month, according to HBO talk show host Bill Maher. That’s a message circulating on Facebook recently, promoted by the ""Bill Maher Fanpage."" A reader asked us to check it out. The quote comes from the Oct. 2 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, where Maher discussed Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that jacked up the cost of a life-saving drug from $13.50 to $750 essentially overnight. ""Not that (Turing CEO Martin) Shkreli is unusual for the pharmaceutical industry,"" Maher said on his show. ""Fifteen years ago, cancer drugs cost an average of $10,000 a year. Now it’s $10,000 a month because this cartel owns the U.S. government every bit as much as Mexican drug lords own theirs."" It’s well known that the cost of health care is on the rise, but has the annual cost of cancer drugs really increased so dramatically in just a decade and a half? Maher’s team sent us links to some news articles about the rising cost of cancer drugs, and we tracked down information that speaks to his claim. The best information we could nail down is the cost of anticancer drugs at launch, the initial price when the Federal Drug Administration approves a drug. These are the sticker prices set by the pharmaceutical companies, not the prices patients actually pay out of pocket, which are reduced by insurance payments, patient assistance programs and other discounts. Costs increases, though, are often passed on to consumers. Maher has a point that cancer drug costs are on the rise. We charted the launch costs of cancer drugs the FDA approved since 1999, using a list compiled by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The second half of Maher’s statement -- that cancer drugs now cost about $10,000 a month -- is also on solid ground. Of drugs approved in 2015, the monthly average cost is $11,319. And experts in the field often cite that $10,000 figure themselves. Because many cancer drugs are not administered to patients for a full year, it’s difficult to determine an average annual cost, so the first half of Maher’s statement -- that they cost about $10,000 a year 15 years ago -- is hard to nail down. To his point, though, the monthly cost of a new drug was dramatically lower in 2000 than what it is now at about $4,634. One of the news articles that Maher’s team sent us is an academic article in the Journal of Oncology Practice that supports his statement. The report reads, ""The average cancer drug price for approximately one year of therapy or a total treatment duration was less than $10,000 before 2000."" Maher’s statement is ""in the ballpark,"" if not an understatement, said Rena Conti, a health economist at the University of Chicago who researches cancer drug prices. In a 2015 paper Conti authored with three other leading health economists, she examined the launch cost of anticancer drugs controlled for inflation and the benefit to the patient (how much it prolongs life expectancy). For example, in 1995, anticancer drugs cost $54,100 for an additional year of life, the study found. In 2005, drugs cost $139,100 for the same benefit, and the price grew to $207,000 in 2013. In the United States, pharmaceutical companies set their own drug prices. What’s pushing them to increase the costs? It’s not necessarily that cancer drugs are getting better and are thus worth more. Conti’s research concluded that just about one-fifth of the cancer drug cost increase can be attributed to a better product. There are two primary forces behind annual cancer drug cost increases, Conti said: First, pharmaceutical companies estimate a ""zone of indifference"" -- based on last year’s prices, how much more would buyers be willing to pay? Second, rebates and discounts for drugs have also increased over time, and this creates an incentive for drug companies to increase their costs alongside the discounts. Pharmaceutical companies defend drug price increases by emphasizing that the revenue funds innovative research and that drugs lower overall health care costs by treating illnesses. Because there’s no formal price regulation and competition in the industry is rare, ""It really is a system where there’s no downward pressure on drug prices,"" said Peter Bach, director of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Center for Health Policy and Outcomes in an interview with Fortune. Our ruling Maher said, ""15 years ago, cancer drugs cost an average of $10,000 a year. Now it’s $10,000 a month."" The average annual cost of a drug isn’t easy to calculate, given the way cancer drugs are scheduled; many drugs aren’t used every month for an entire year. So the first half of the statement is hard to verify, though we did find one academic source that cites a similar figure. However, Maher has a point that the cost of cancer drugs has increased dramatically since 2000, when the average monthly price of a cancer drug, when it first hit the market, was about $4,600. In 2015, the monthly cost is over $10,000. Maher’s numbers are a little squishy, but they’re in the ballpark." Claim: 15 years ago, cancer drugs cost an average of $10,000 a year. Now it’s $10,000 a month.
Example Output: "Maher said, ""15 years ago, cancer drugs cost an average of $10,000 a year. Now it’s $10,000 a month."" The average annual cost of a drug isn’t easy to calculate, given the way cancer drugs are scheduled; many drugs aren’t used every month for an entire year. So the first half of the statement is hard to verify, though we did find one academic source that cites a similar figure. However, Maher has a point that the cost of cancer drugs has increased dramatically since 2000, when the average monthly price of a cancer drug, when it first hit the market, was about $4,600. In 2015, the monthly cost is over $10,000. Maher’s numbers are a little squishy, but they’re in the ballpark."

Example Input: Paragraph: Such a test could initially be used to select patients for clinical trials of experimental treatments being developed to try to halt progression of Alzheimer’s, the researchers said, and may one day move into routine use in doctors’ clinics. “Alzheimer’s begins to affect the brain many years before patients are diagnosed (and) many of our drug trials fail because by the time patients are given the drugs the brain has already been too severely affected,” said Simon Lovestone of Oxford University, who led this work from King’s College London. “A simple blood test could help us identify patients at a much earlier stage to take part in new trials and hopefully develop treatments,” he said. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, a brain-wasting disease which in 2010 was estimated to be costing the world $604 billion a year. The fatal disease affects 44 million people worldwide, with the number set to triple by 2050, the campaign group Alzheimer’s Disease International says. Several big pharma firms including Roche, Eli Lilly, Merck & Co and Johnson & Johnson, are pursuing various approaches to get to the root cause of Alzheimer’s and try to find treatments to halt its progression. Yet over the past 15 years, more than 100 experimental Alzheimer’s drugs have failed in trial. Lovestone and other experts believe this may be because drug trials are conducted too late, in patients whose condition has already gone too far. A predictive test for use before people develop symptoms would help researchers select the right people for drug trials, and help show whether the experimental drugs are working. Previous studies have found that PET brain scans and tests of lumbar fluid can be used to predict the onset of dementia from people with a less severe condition known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), but these tests are expensive and invasive, so scientists are keen to develop a cheaper, simpler blood test. MCI includes problems with day-to-day memory, language and attention. It can be an early sign of dementia, or a symptom of stress or anxiety. Around 10 percent of people diagnosed with MCI develop dementia within a year. Apart from regular assessments to measure memory decline, there is currently no accurate way of predicting who will or won’t develop dementia. For this study, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, Lovestone’s team used blood samples from 1,148 people - 476 with Alzheimer’s, 220 with mild cognitive impairment and 452 elderly controls without dementia. They were analyzed for 26 proteins previously found to be linked with Alzheimer’s. The team found 16 of these 26 proteins to be strongly associated with brain shrinkage in either MCI or Alzheimer’s and then ran a second series of tests to see which of these could predict which patients would progress from MCI to Alzheimer’s. With this second series, they found a combination of 10 proteins capable of predicting with 87 percent accuracy whether people with MCI would develop Alzheimer’s disease within a year. Experts in the field welcomed the results but said they should be replicated in larger studies before an Alzheimer’s blood test could be rolled out for use in doctors’ clinics. “The results reported today are interesting, but as the authors point out there is still a very large amount of work remaining until a usable blood test for Alzheimer’s disease becomes available,” said Adrian Pini of the MRC Center for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London. James Pickett, head of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said the research “does not mean that a blood test for dementia is just around the corner”. “These 10 proteins can predict conversion to dementia with less than 90 percent accuracy, meaning one in 10 people would get an incorrect result,” he said. “Accuracy would need to be improved before it could be a useful diagnostic test.” Claim: Study paves the way for a blood test to predict Alzheimer's.
Example Output: British scientists have identified a set of 10 proteins in the blood that can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s and call this an important step towards developing a test for the incurable brain-wasting disease.

Example Input: Paragraph: “We’re just sicker,” said Rebekah Gee, who until January was the health secretary for Louisiana and now heads Louisiana State University’s healthcare services division. “We already had tremendous healthcare disparities before this pandemic – one can only imagine they are being amplified now.”  Along with New York and Seattle, New Orleans has emerged as one of the early U.S. hot spots for the coronavirus, making it a national test case for how to control and treat the disease it causes. Chief among the concerns raised by doctors working in the Louisiana city is the death rate, which is twice that of New York and over four times that of Seattle, based on Thursday’s publicly reported data. New Orleans residents suffer from obesity, diabetes and hypertension at rates higher than the national average, conditions that doctors and public health officials say can make patients more vulnerable to COVID-19, the highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus. Some 97% of those killed by COVID-19 in Louisiana had a pre-existing condition, according to the state health department. Diabetes was seen in 40% of the deaths, obesity in 25%, chronic kidney disease in 23% and cardiac problems in 21%. Orleans Parish, which encompasses the city, reported 125 confirmed coronavirus deaths as of Thursday, the equivalent of 32 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 people. That rate for New York City was at 15.9 on Thursday. New Orleans could be a harbinger for the potential toll the pandemic could take in other parts of the South and Midwest that also have high rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. A host of other factors could contribute to New Orleans’ high death rate from COVID-19, ranging from access to healthcare and hospital quality, to the prevalence of other conditions, including lung disease, health officials say. But they also note that it is clear that obesity-related conditions are playing a role in the deaths. That could be a warning sign for the United States at large, where chronic obesity is more common than in other developed countries, they said. Hospitals are reporting cases across the generations -mothers and daughters, fathers and sons - being intubated and cared for in the same intensive care units, said Tracey Moffatt, the chief nursing officer at Ochsner Health, the largest healthcare provider in Louisiana. The prevalence of obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in New Orleans and Louisiana plays into that, she said. Those family members often suffered from the same medical conditions before becoming sick, leaving them similarly vulnerable to the coronavirus despite their age gaps. “We had a case where a mom was already in the ICU and the daughter, who was obese, came in,” she said. “The daughter asked staff to wheel her by her mom’s room so she could say goodbye before she herself was intubated. We knew the mother was going to pass away.”  Both patients suffered from obesity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week released for the first time a report showing that 78% of COVID-19 patients in ICUs in the United States had an underlying health condition, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and chronic lung disease. The CDC report was based on a sample of under 6% of reported coronavirus infections, but doctors in Louisiana said it was consistent with what they are seeing, and it is in line with what other countries like Italy and China have faced. Those percentages, said Dr. Joseph Kanter, an emergency department doctor and the top public health official in New Orleans, are likely similar in cities across the United States. “What we worry about here is that we have more people in our communities with those conditions,” he said. “We’re more vulnerable than other communities, and the number of deaths we’ve seen illustrates that.”   The New Orleans metropolitan statistical area ranks among the worst in the United States for the percentage of residents with diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, a Reuters analysis of CDC data shows. An estimated 39% have high blood pressure, 36% are obese and about 15% have diabetes. Nationally, the median is 32% with high blood pressure, 31% obese and 11% with diabetes. “The burden of disease in Louisiana and the Deep South is higher than in the rest of the country,” said Gee. “Invariably that means that the South is going to be hard hit by this.” Claim: Why is New Orleans' coronavirus death rate twice New York's? Obesity is a factor.
Example Output:
The coronavirus has been a far deadlier threat in New Orleans than the rest of the United States, with a per-capita death rate  twice that of New York City. Doctors, public health officials and available data say the Big Easy’s high levels of obesity and related ailments may be part of the problem.