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: The bulk of the money will come from Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. and its affiliates for paying to delay a generic narcolepsy drug, Provigil, from entering the market for nearly six years. Teva is paying $69 million, which Becerra says is the largest pay-for-delay settlement received by any state. Such agreements let the developer of brand name drugs keep their monopolies over the drugs after their patents expire, thereby letting them continue to charge consumers higher prices. The drug developer pays the generic manufacturer to keep the cheaper version of the drug from entering the marketplace for an agreed period of time. Teva said the money will come from a pre-existing fund that was created in 2015 as part of the company's settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over similar claims, and it will not make any additional payments. Becerra said such agreements can force consumers and the health care market to pay as much as 90% more than if there were generic alternatives. More than $25 million of the settlement will go to a consumer fund for California residents who purchased Provigil, Nuvigil or Modafinil between 2006 and 2012. "No one in America should be forced to skip or ration doses of medicine that they need ... and certainly not because a drug company is colluding to keep the price of your drug artificially high even when cheaper options could be available. But that's what's happening," Becerra said. The second, $760,000 settlement is with Teva, Endo Pharmaceuticals and Teikoku Pharma USA over keeping a genetic alternative to the pain patch Lidoderm from entering the market for nearly two years. Teva said it is paying $200,000 to cover the state's legal costs after settling similar federal claims earlier this year. Neither Endo nor Teikoku responded to requests for comment. Both settlements bar the companies from pay-for-delay agreements for several years. Teva is agreeing to not to enter any such agreements for 10 years, while Endo Pharmaceuticals has an eight-year agreement and Teikoku a 20-year injunction. Teva said the restriction is identical to its federal consent decree. Becerra also backed pending legislation, AB824 by Democratic Assemblyman Jim Wood of Santa Rosa, that would ban such agreements. The measure would require pharmaceutical companies to prove that their agreements are not anticompetitive. It passed the Assembly 56-0 in May and is awaiting a vote in the Senate. Pharmaceutical companies oppose the bill, arguing the Federal Trade Commission already does this monitoring. ___ This story has been corrected to say that while there are four settlement agreements, they involve only three companies. Claim: 3 companies pay California $70 million for delaying drugs.

SOLUTION: Three pharmaceutical companies collectively are agreeing to pay California nearly $70 million to settle allegations that they delayed drugs to keep prices high, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said Monday.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: "One theme Sen. Bernie Sanders has repeatedly touched on during his run for the Democratic nomination for president has been the high cost of prescription drugs. His comment during the Feb. 11 Democratic debate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was typical as he rattled off a list of problems with the U.S. health care system: ""In America, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs."" We asked the Sanders campaign for the source of his claim. We didn't get a response. So we searched on our own. One organization that tracks such things is the International Federation of Health Plans, based in London. Their latest price report, from 2013, lists eight common drugs. Compared with England, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and Canada, U.S. prices were far higher, sometimes dramatically so. Consider Nexium, the medicine widely used to treat acid reflux. A prescription that would cost $60 or less in other countries costs, on average, $215 in the United States. And that's just the average. Prices vary widely in this country: In 5 percent of the cases, the cost was $395. ""What Bernie says is true. There's nowhere that pays the same price as America,"" said Tom Sackville, the federation's CEO. In addition, ""there is this huge variation in price across America. Anything above the average is quite unjustified. When you get up to the 95th percentile, you're talking grand robbery."" The findings were similar in an April 2013 study published in the journal Health Affairs, which looked at the prices of brand name drugs in the United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, France, Canada and Australia. In each of the three years studied -- 2005, 2007 and 2010 -- U.S. prices were consistently higher. The one exception: Switzerland. In addition, researchers found that, between 2005 and 2010, ""the gap between the United States and other countries seemed to widen."" And it wasn't just new drugs being embraced first in the United States that was driving up costs. They concluded that ""prices for older products rose faster in the United States than in other countries."" But Joel Farley of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Eshelman School of Pharmacy cautioned that the rule doesn't always apply to generic drugs. A 2008 comparison of 19 generic drugs found that some U.S. prices were lower than Canadian prices. ""In some cases it has to do with availability,"" he said. In other cases, a country may set the drug price low and in that fixed-price market ""there's no incentive to go lower."" The Wall Street Journal published an analysis in December that concluded 98 percent of 40 top branded drugs were more expensive in the United States than in England. In Norway, 93 percent of the 40 top branded drugs cost lessthan in the United States. And in Ontario, a comparison of 30 drugs showed that U.S. prices were also higher for 93 percent of the products. Why are the brand name prices so much lower in other countries, and why is there so much variation in the United States? Big customers can negotiate big discounts. So the countries with socialized medicine have a lot of leverage at the negotiating table, the experts told us. In the United States, hospitals, wholesalers and insurance companies all do their own negotiations. The Veterans Administration can -- and does -- negotiate dramatically lower prices. Under Medicaid, the drug companies are required to provide their medicines at a price that's as low as it is for any of their regular customers. But Medicare has been prohibited by law from negotiating lower prices since 2006, and that's a huge chunk of the U.S. health care industry. (When Barack Obama was first running for president, he promised to repeal that Bush-era restriction, but then backed off in an attempt to get passage of the Affordable Care Act.) The pharmaceutical industry says it needs the extra income to pay for research to keep new, desperately needed drugs coming. But with everyone getting a bargain, Americans are financing that research for the rest of the world, experts told us. Yet there's another way to look at the issue, said Amitava Dasgupta, a clinical toxicologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The tablet that costs a dollar in the United States may only cost 20 cents in India, but that drug is far more expensive to the average person in India because their income is so much lower. ""The U.S. subsidizes research for the world,"" he said. ""But I would look at that as philanthropy."" Our ruling Sanders said, ""In America, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs."" When it comes to brand-name drugs, which yield the highest profit for the pharmaceutical industry, studies support Sanders' claim -- although not always on a drug-by-drug basis. In addition, the differences in price can be dramatic because the U.S. health care system is so splintered, and Medicare is prohibited by law from using its market share to bargain for lower prices. We found one study comparing the United States and Canada that found exceptions for generic drugs, where the profit margin is much lower and which make up a much smaller share of prescription drug spending. But on balance," Claim: In America, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

SOLUTION: "Sanders said, ""In America, we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs."" When it comes to brand-name drugs, which yield the highest profit for the pharmaceutical industry, studies support Sanders' claim -- although not always on a drug-by-drug basis. In addition, the differences in price can be dramatic because the U.S. health care system is so splintered, and Medicare is prohibited by law from using its market share to bargain for lower prices. We found one study comparing the United States and Canada that found exceptions for generic drugs, where the profit margin is much lower and which make up a much smaller share of prescription drug spending."

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Attorney General Hector Balderas and the New Mexico Environment Department on Wednesday filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction to require regular groundwater and surface water sampling as the case proceeds. They also want the Air Force to offer voluntary blood tests for residents who may have been exposed to the contamination as well as provide additional documentation on the extent of contamination around Cannon and Holloman air bases. The state sued in April, saying the federal government has a responsibility to clean up toxic chemicals left behind by past military firefighting activities. "I am extremely frustrated that the Air Force has not been responsive to protecting the health and safety of New Mexican families by addressing years of environmental pollution," Balderas said in a statement. The contamination is linked to chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. The Air Force has not commented directly on the pending litigation but has argued its response to PFAS contamination in New Mexico and elsewhere has been aggressive. Officials have said they've been working with regulators to identify and implement long-term solutions to prevent exposure. New Mexico environmental regulators first issued a notice of violation to the Air Force in 2018 for failing to properly address the contamination at Cannon Air Force Base near Clovis. They followed earlier this year on Holloman, saying that base had violated its state permit and had yet to respond to concerns about the pollution near Alamogordo. Balderas in May requested that a publicly accessible lake at Holloman be closed to limit exposure after sampling indicated PFAS contamination was dozens of times higher than federal health advisory levels. Fed by treated wastewater from the base, the lake already is off limits to swimming but camping is allowed along the shoreline. Balderas' office said Wednesday it believed the lake was still open. Similar contamination has been found at dozens of military sites across the nation, and growing evidence that exposure can be dangerous has prompted the EPA to consider setting a maximum level for the chemicals in drinking water nationwide. Currently only non-enforceable drinking water health advisories are in place. Members of New Mexico's congressional delegation have argued that the contamination needs to be addressed. A defense spending bill pending in Congress includes some provisions aimed at tackling PFAS, from funding further study on the best ways to clean up and dispose of contaminated groundwater and soils to assistance for dairies and other affected businesses. Claim: New Mexico AG 'frustrated' with response to contamination.

SOLUTION:
Top New Mexico officials want the U.S. Air Force to immediately begin defining the boundaries of plumes of contamination at two bases in the state and provide alternate water supplies to affected residents.