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: The Department of Health Services reported Friday that Wisconsin has seen 459 hospitalizations and 11 deaths due to flu complications this season. The number of hospitalizations is three times higher than last year at this time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has elevated Wisconsin to its high flu category. South-central and southwestern Wisconsin have been hardest hit. And physicians said it could get worse before it gets better. “The best thought is that we are still going to be seeing it rise before we see it fall. Generally, the flu season lasts anywhere between four and 12 weeks, with eight kind of being the average,” said Dr. Joseph McBride, an infectious disease specialist at UW Health in Madison. “I would imagine we are going to remain pretty high throughout January, but we’ll see.”   In Milwaukee: 131 people have been hospitalized with the flu compared with 17 at this time last season. “We know that it’s hitting some families pretty hard,” Aurora Health Care pediatrician Dr. Kevin Dahlman said. State Health Officer Jeanne Ayers urged anyone who has not had an annual flu shot to get one. Claim: Flu hospitalizations spike across Wisconsin with 11 deaths .
Wisconsin health officials are urging people to protect themselves as flu numbers spike across the state.

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: "In a September 2011 floor speech, Democratic U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin spoke of two concerns he said are growing in the Lone Star State: poverty and hunger. Doggett said that in tough times, more families are turning to food banks, creating ""immense"" demand. Among his examples: The Austin-based Capital Area Food Bank of Texas ""this year is delivering 50 percent more food to poor people than it did three years ago."" In his speech, Doggett attributed that figure to John Turner, a food bank official. We wondered if the proclaimed increase was correct, and if so, whether that accurately reflected a surge in hunger in our area. The food bank, founded in 1981, takes in donations of food and money from the government, the food industry and the public, then distributes food to Central Texas residents directly and through more than 350 agencies in its 21-county service area roughly centered on Travis and Williamson counties. (Click to view a map.) The region’s north edge runs from Mills County in the west to Freestone County in the east; its south edge runs from Gillespie and Blanco counties in the west to Fayette County on the east. Doggett spokeswoman Sarah Dohl told us by email that Doggett drew his 50 percent figure from a Sept. 4, 2011, news story in the Guardian, a British newspaper, which quotes Turner saying the food bank was delivering 50 percent more food to the poor than it had done three years ago. In an interview, Turner, the food bank’s senior director for marketing and branding, recently told us he’d given the Guardian a conservative estimate: The pounds of food distributed by the bank had actually increased 64 percent, going from 15.4 million pounds in 2007 to 25.3 million pounds in 2010. Turner noted, too, that the 2010 poundage was inflated by one-time federal stimulus aid enabling the bank to buy an additional 2.3 million pounds for the Summer Food Nutrition Program. Subtract that, and the 2010 figure becomes 23 million pounds -- up 49 percent from what the bank gave out in 2007. So, do the poundage figures mean hunger in the area shot up 49 percent or more over the past few years? J.C. Dwyer of the Texas Food Bank Network, the state association of food banks, told us pounds of food distributed generally isn't the best measure of need in a food bank's region: ""It’s more of a metric for how we’re dealing with the needs,"" Dwyer said. A better way of gauging needs, he said, is to track the number of residents requesting food assistance. That is, the amount of food distributed doesn't necessarily reflect ups and downs in need. In the holiday season, donations and distributions surge, for instance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean surges in need. Dwyer and Turner each suggested we check on changes in food demands through ""Hunger in America,"" a report commissioned every four years by Feeding America, a national charity that acts as a clearinghouse connecting food supplies to 200 food banks, including the one in Austin. There was no ""Hunger in America"" report for 2007, the first year in Doggett’s statement, but the reports based on surveys in 2005 and 2009 were broken down into smaller reports covering the Austin bank’s 21-county region: In 2005, the Capital Area bank fed an estimated 174,900 people. In 2009, the estimated number of people served was 284,900 for the year, up 63 percent from those who were served in 2005. That change outstripped population growth, according to U.S. census estimates. In 2005, the 21 counties had 2,265,981 residents. By 2009, the region’s population was 2,547,559 -- up 12.4 percent. Put another way, the food bank provided sustenance to nearly 8 percent of the region’s residents in 2005 while about 11 percent of a greater total of residents got food in 2009. Finally, we wondered if Doggett was correct in saying the food aid went to the poor alone. Turner told us the bank does not question people who come seeking food as to their income -- if you show up, you are fed, he said, though depending on the lines that form, it could take an hour or two. However, the ""Hunger in America"" report using 2009 data states that 73 percent of the Capital Area food bank’s clients had incomes below the federal poverty level. Census figures for 2010, drawing on 2009 data, show that poverty in the 21-county region matched the percentage for Texas overall: Seventeen percent of residents had income below the federal poverty level. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, Dwyer told us, ""food insecurity"" across Texas -- the percentage of households at risk of missing meals because of financial pressure -- rose from 14.8 percent in the three-year period 2005-07 to 18.8 percent in 2008-10. Our conclusion: Changes in the amount of food distributed over several years, which Doggett cited, might not be the best way to gauge changes in residents’ needs. That said, the number of Central Texas requestors for food aid over those years outpaced regional population growth. The 63 percent increase in requestors also exceeded the 50-percent increase in food distributed that he stressed, though, contrary to his statement, not all those pounds of food went to ""the poor.""" Claim: Lloyd Doggett Says the main Central Texas food bank is delivering 50 percent more food to the poor than three years ago.

Lloyd Doggett says Central Texas food bank deliveries up 50 percent from three years ago