TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: Paragraph: Up to 94 students will get scholarships on campuses in Phoenix and Tucson, the UA Colleges of Medicine said. For each year of tuition waived, they’ll have to commit to working in an underserved area after their residency for one year. The scholarships are funded with $3 million from an $8 million state funding plan approved earlier this year. The rest of that money will allow growth from 80 to 100 medical students at UA’s Phoenix campus. State and federal governments have looked to a wide variety of grants, scholarships, loan forgiveness and other initiatives to seek out doctors willing to work in underserved areas and support them financially. An aging population and projected physician retirements have fueled concerns that the U.S. will face a growing shortage of providers — a problem felt hardest in lower-income areas. Physician groups say high debt burdens discourage new doctors from working in primary care in rural or urban underserved areas, which tend to come with lower salaries than jobs in specialties or wealthy areas. Debt concerns discourage some would-be doctors from even applying to medical school, Dr. Michael Dake, senior vice president of UA Health Sciences, said in a news release. The scholarships will be available only to UA students who qualify as Arizona residents. Eligible post-residency specializations include family medicine, general internal medicine, geriatrics, pediatrics, psychiatry, and obstetrics and gynecology. Eligible underserved areas are designated by the federal government based on having too few doctors, high infant mortality rates, high poverty or a large elderly population. UA medical school tuition for Arizona residents is about $33,000 per year. Medical school is four years. Arizona’s physician training capacity has grown in recent years with the opening of the UA’s Phoenix campus and schools run by the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, A.T. Still University in Mesa and Midwestern University in Glendale. Nebraska-based Creighton University is building a health sciences campus that will include a medical school in midtown Phoenix. Claim: Scholarships target doctors in Arizona underserved areas.

SOLUTION: University of Arizona’s medical school announced Friday that it will give free tuition to some students who commit to working as primary care doctors in underserved areas, an effort to improve access to health care in areas where it’s most lacking.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: "As a matter of course, stories about the increased use of drugs should report the drugs’ prices. A change in guidelines based on the study would increase the number of patients eligible for treatment by several hundred thousand in the US. The annualized cost of drug treatment is $12,000-$24,000 depending on the regimen, leading to potential new expenditures of $24 to $48 billion. While there are significant offsets, the potential for this level of additional costs should have been included in the story The story states that delaying treatment ""nearly doubles the risk of dying over the next several years"" and yields a ""70 percent improvement in survival."" This reporting is vague. The story should have compared absolute risks, not relative risks. See our primer on this issue. The story should have included the time span studied. These numbers should have stated the two death rates directly so readers can understand the magnitude of the benefit–whether the risk of death went from [say] 2 percent to 1 percent or from 30 percent to 15 percent. The story places the recommended treatment of earlier drug intervention in the context of the treatments’ known side effects, which can be very serious. The story should have described the severity of those side effects. We give this a satisfactory score, but barely. The report is based on a study presented at a major medical meeting. The story should have mentioned the fact that it has not been published or peer-reviewed. It should also have pointed out that it was a retrospective cohort study, which is considered to be less conclusive than prospective, double-blind studies. It should also have pointed out, as the NIH press release does, that a clinical trial is needed to validate the results in a way that would call for changing the current guidelines. These failures to provide caveats and context earn the story an ""unsatisfactory"" rating under this criterion. The story does not exaggerate the gravity or prevalance of AIDS. The story quotes Anthony Fauci, one of the best-known and -respected experts in the field of HIV/AIDS. The story also quotes the study’s lead investigator, and the author of AIDS treatment guidelines. That source’s link to companies that make AIDS drugs is properly noted. The story also quotes an independent clinician familiar with the guidelines and the current research. The story plainly compares the current guidelines with the regimen tested. The story explains that the drug combinations used by AIDS patients have been widely used since the mid-1990s. No claims are made for the novelty of the drug treatment. The recommendation to treat earlier is presented not as novel, but as a plan under consideration and study for quite some time. The story does not draw excessively on the NIH press release." Claim: AIDS treatment should be started sooner, study says

SOLUTION: "This is a Columbus Dispatch version of a story reported by the Associated Press. Since the Columbus paper changed the original article substantially, we send our comments to the Columbus paper. Taking the big view, this story about the benefits of starting the standard multi-drug AIDS treatment sooner than current guidelines suggest accomplishes its mission. It fairly describes important new research that verifies earlier work suggesting the same thing. It says, correctly, that the continuing research could drive changes in treatment. The story is well-sourced and provides a lucid description of the disease process and detailed definition of ""early"" treatment. Having said that, the report falls short of two key best practices:  It fails to quantify the benefits of early treatment in a meaningful way. It uses ""relative risk"" [a percent reduction in mortality] instead of ""absolute risk"" [which would allow readers to understand the gravity of the risk and the size of the benefit. It fails to describe the limitations of the study with caveats and context. If the story had mentioned those limitations, its predictions of imminent clinical use and eventual changes to the guidelines would have been properly tempered. As presented, the story fails to check the sources’ consistent enthusiasm with journalistic disinterest. Given the credibility of the study, the opinions of multiple high-quality sources and the previous research record, the predictions seem justifiable. But the history of AIDS science, treatment and politics recommends a bit more reporting distance and care."

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Legislators signed off on the special voting provisions for the 2020 elections shortly before their deadline to pass bills in an unusual session that was interrupted for several weeks because of concerns about the virus that causes COVID-19. Voters currently can request absentee ballots only if they provide an excuse for why they can’t vote in person. Illness is one option, but the law isn’t explicit on whether the illness excuse covers healthy voters concerned about catching or spreading COVID-19. Under the bill sent to Republican Gov. Mike Parson, people considered at-risk of the coronavirus — those age 65 and older, living in a long-term care facility or with certain existing health problems — could vote absentee without needing to have their ballot notarized. Anyone else could cast a mail-in ballot but would need to get it notarized. The bill passed with bipartisan support but received mixed reviews from both parties. Republicans said it doesn’t include enough restrictions to ensure election security, and Democrats said it has too many rules. “When you are not wanting to go to the polls because you are either ill or fearful of becoming ill, but then you have to go get a notary to be able to not go to the polls, it doesn’t really fix the problem,” House Democratic Minority Leader Crystal Quade said. Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft on Friday said he no longer supported the measure after lawmakers stripped a contested photo ID requirement out of it. Lawmakers returned to the Capitol to work on the state budget and other policies days before Parson lifted his statewide stay-at-home order in early May. Members of the public were allowed in the Capitol to watch debate but were encouraged to stay home, prompting concern from some lawmakers about lack of public involvement in crafting major policy changes. Both lawmakers and visitors were quizzed on their health and had their temperatures checked before they could enter the building. “The work that we did here today I think was important enough that legislators made the decision that they were going to go ahead and come to the building to do work,” Republican House Speaker Elijah Haahr said. “We understand the risks involved.” Few lawmakers wore masks in the final days of session, and legislators frequently sat close to one another to vote. Lawmakers also faced pressure to act on crime legislation following a bloody 2019 and a violent start to 2020. The deaths of two men on Tuesday night were Kansas City’s 63rd and 64th homicides this year. St. Louis police reported 53 homicides as of Friday. A bill headed to Parson’s desk would create the crime of vehicle hijacking, expand the number of crimes that are considered dangerous felonies, ban probation for some crimes, and broaden what’s considered a criminal street gang, along with increased penalties for taking part in gang activities. “This is going to help get the most violent habitual offenders off of the streets,” Republican Rep. Nick Schroer said. The bill sparked outrage from House lawmakers who said it could reverse a drop in the state’s prison population following a bipartisan push for criminal justice reform in recent years. “It doesn’t make us safer,” Republican Rep. Shamed Dogan said of longer prison sentences. “It sounds good in campaign ads, but it does not actually increase public safety. This has been shown time and time and time and time again by research.” Longstanding efforts to make Missouri the last state to adopt a prescription drug database to track addictive medications failed. Republican skeptics in the Senate expressed no interest in compromising on the House-backed bill Friday after a feud between the two GOP-led chambers. At issue was a House provision that could thwart efforts to build a wind-energy power line that was slipped onto another Senate bill without senators noticing. Senators on Thursday hurriedly revoked a bill they had just passed, a highly unusual move, when they caught the amendment. Few bills made it across the finish line during lawmaker’s roughly five month session, about 50 compared to more than 90 last year. The Republican-led Legislature this week did succeed in sending a new redistricting plan to the ballot that will ask voters to undo key parts of another redistricting measure they passed less than two years ago. Supporters wanted to accomplish the move this year because new state House and Senate districts will be drawn in 2021. ___ Associated Press writer David A. Lieb contributed to this report. Claim: Missouri lawmakers OK mail-in voting on final day of work.

SOLUTION:
Missouri lawmakers wrapped up their work Friday by passing bills allowing people to vote by mail because of the coronavirus and ramping up criminal penalties in response to an uptick in violent crime in the state’s biggest cities.