TASK DEFINITION: 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.
PROBLEM: The Health Department said Wednesday that different variations of the virus are circulating in different parts of the state. The agency says 21 pneumonia and flu deaths have been reported so far this season. Last season, 237 New Mexicans died of pneumonia and/or influenza. Symptoms may include rapid onset of illness with fever, cough, sore throat, headache and/or muscle aches. New Mexico Health Secretary Kathyleen Kunkel says with the holidays approaching, it's important that people take preventive measures such as getting vaccinated, covering coughs and staying home when sick. Officials say the peak of the flu season is still to come.

SOLUTION: Health officials: Flu activity widespread in New Mexico.

PROBLEM: The Associated Press has learned that the attorneys general in Illinois and the District of Columbia are examining how Juul's blockbuster vaping device became so popular with underage teens. The company's rapid rise to the top of the multi-billion dollar U.S. e-cigarette market has been accompanied by accusations from parents, politicians and public health advocates that Juul fueled a vaping craze among high schoolers. In addition to the ongoing inquiries in Illinois and the district, which had not been publicly disclosed before, four other state attorneys general are probing or suing Juul. Juul's top executives have disputed allegations that they've marketed their products to teens, declaring that they've taken unprecedented steps to combat underage use of its e-cigarettes. The company has shut down its Facebook and Instagram pages and pulled several of its flavored products out of retail stores. Juul also backs federal legislation to raise the minimum age to purchase all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, to 21 nationwide. Juul spokesman Ted Kwong declined to answer specific questions about the investigations in an emailed statement but reiterated past company steps to prevent youth use. Juul announced Thursday that 50 retail chains have pledged to adopt the company's age-verification system, which requires sellers to scan a customer's ID before selling Juul products. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement Friday the Trump administration "will continue using every regulatory and enforcement power we have to stop the epidemic of youth e-cigarette use." A senior Illinois law enforcement official described to AP a wide-ranging inquiry being conducted by the office of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul that is centered on whether Juul violated state consumer fraud laws and other statutes by designing and marketing its products to appeal to underage teens. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity. Marrisa Geller, a spokeswoman for District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine, confirmed in an emailed statement an investigation of Juul is underway. She said Racine is concerned about "the dramatic increase in the use of vaping products by district youth" as well as the policies and practices employed by e-cigarette manufacturers to prevent minors from using their products. The attorneys general in Colorado, Connecticut and Massachusetts have announced investigations of Juul related to concerns over underage use of its products. North Carolina's attorney general filed a lawsuit against Juul in May, asking a court to limit the company's sales and marketing in the state. All six attorneys general are Democrats. The Food and Drug Administration said last October it seized thousands of documents from Juul's San Francisco headquarters relating to the company's marketing. The agency has been investigating whether the company targeted youth with the flavors, design and ingredients of its products. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Juul's early marketing campaign and use of social media to promote its products. The FTC declined to comment. Juul has repeatedly stated that it understands the concerns about youth vaping and has taken "the most aggressive actions" of any company in the industry to combat the problem. It has spent millions of dollars on newspaper, radio and online advertisements pledging to keep its products out of the hands of young people. The company also has denied it ever marketed to anyone underage. Kwong said Juul's earliest marketing campaign, in 2015, was aimed at adults between 25 and 34. Based on the sales and revenue, he said, "there is no evidence that it drove use, youth or otherwise." Kwong said the company's paid social media "influencer" program was as a small, short-lived program that ended in 2018. Electronic cigarettes, which have been available in the U.S. since about 2007 and have grown into a more than $6 billion-a-year industry, are battery-powered devices that typically heat a flavored nicotine solution into an inhalable aerosol. Juul, which launched in 2015, now controls roughly three-quarters of the U.S. retail market for e-cigarettes. Last year, one in five U.S. high school students reported vaping in the previous month, according to government survey figures. Most experts agree the aerosol is less harmful than cigarette smoke since it doesn't contain most of the cancer-causing byproducts of burning tobacco. But there is virtually no research on the long-term effects of the vaping chemicals, some of which are toxic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that 215 teens and adults in 25 states including Illinois have contracted severe respiratory illnesses after vaping. However, the agency said a clear-cut common cause of the illnesses hasn't been identified and they are being called "potential cases" that are still under investigation. The CDC said in many of the cases patients had acknowledged they'd recently vaped a substance containing THC, the high-inducing ingredient in marijuana. The agency did not say how many of the patients were teens. Kevin Burns, Juul's chief executive officer, told "CBS This Morning" on Wednesday the illnesses are "worrisome" for the industry and for Juul "if we contributed to it." He said the company is in close contact with the CDC to get as much information as it can "so if there's any issue that was ... associated with us, that we can get to the root cause and understand that." In Illinois, the state's Department of Public Health has called e-cigarette use among teens an "epidemic" and said there is an alarming lack of understanding about the risk for nicotine addiction. Other areas being investigated by Raoul's office include: how Juul verifies the ages of people who make online purchases from the company's website; the amount of nicotine in the flavored solution and how safe those levels are; and whether Juul has improperly advertised its e-cigarette as a smoking-cessation tool. Kwong said the Juul system is designed to help adult smokers switch from combustible cigarettes and is not intended to be used as a cessation product. Neither Juul nor any other e-cigarette has yet been approved by the FDA to help people who smoke traditional paper-and-tobacco cigarettes quit. The Illinois probe began in the spring. Raoul's office is not coordinating its investigation with other attorneys general, the official said. Geller, the spokeswoman for Racine, declined to discuss the scope of the district's inquiry. However, a senior official in Racine's office wrote to a Juul representative in early February and asked for a trove of information about how district residents purchase the company's products. Among the data sought by Benjamin Wiseman, director of consumer protection, was a list of authorized retail stores and third-party online retailers that failed to comply with Juul's rules for preventing minors from buying and using its products. Wiseman also asked that the company "describe in detail the nature of the retailer's failure to comply" and what action Juul took in response. Racine's office, Wiseman wrote, learned from news reports and conversations with community members and other government officials that use of Juul's products by young teenagers in the district has increased dramatically in recent years. "Remarkably, one district high school principal estimates that half of the juniors and seniors at her school are using e-cigarettes, many of which we believe are Juul's products," Wiseman told Patrick Lynch, a former attorney general of Rhode Island who runs a lobbying and consulting firm that represents Juul. Lynch's firm arranged for a meeting in the attorney general's office last November that included himself, Juul chief administrative officer Ashley Gould, Wiseman and Assistant DC Attorney General Brian Caldwell, according to emails obtained through an open records request. Lynch is not registered as a lobbyist in the District of Columbia. The agenda for the meeting isn't described in the records, although one email from Lynch said they discussed Juul's efforts "to dramatically diminish youth access to their product."

SOLUTION: Juul Labs facing scrutiny from federal and state officials.

PROBLEM: "Democrats are pleading for patience as they try to reassure the country that the online insurance marketplaces critical to President Barack Obama's health care overhaul can be fixed. Big programs have seen rocky rollouts only to achieve success later, they say. Their top example:the 2005 launch of Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush's prescription drug benefit plan. ""Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out,"" Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told MSNBC on Nov. 6. ""When things go wrong, there are two things we can do as a country. We can spend all our time figuring out who to blame, or we can spend all our time figuring out how to fix it."" Eight years after it went live, Medicare Part D is nowwidely popularamong the seniors who use it. Were there major problems with the rollout of Medicare Part D? And were they comparable to the challenges facing Obamacare? We decided to take a more a detailed look at its implementation. Strangely similar Let's play a quick game: who made this statement? ""This is a huge undertaking and there are going to be glitches. My goal is the same as yours: Get rid of the glitches."" A Democrat in 2013? Wrong! Actually, it wasRep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee, about Medicare Part Din 2006. The similarities between the two health care programs, both heralded as the signature domestic achievements of the presidents who signed them into law, are at times eerie. Supporters of the laws asked for time and promised a quick fix. Critics did not mince their words. Even the lingo -- words like ""glitches"" -- has been recycled. Areport documenting the history of Medicare Part D was released earlier this year bya group of health policy experts at the Center on Health Insurance Reform at Georgetown University. It highlighted several areas where Medicare Part D struggled in its implementation that sound extremely familiar. For one thing, the Bush administration faced a difficult political battle to get the bill passed in 2003. That damaged public opinion of the law, making it a challenge to educate 43 million seniors on its nuances. Enrollment in the law was set to begin in late 2005. In April of that year, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 27 percent of respondents understood the law, while only 21 percent favored it. (In a comparable Kaiser poll in April 2013, 35 percent viewed the Affordable Care Act favorably and less than half felt they were well-informed of its details.) The Medicare site, meant to help seniors pick benefit plans, was supposed to debut Oct. 13, 2005, but it didn'tgo live until weeks later in November. Even then, ""the tool itself appeared to be in need of fixing,"" theWashington Postreportedat the time. ""Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly,"" thePostreported. (Sensing a pattern?) Once seniors began to enroll, problems persisted. According to the report, the online tools had ""accuracy problems,"" and local organizations designated with assisting seniors ""reported problems getting necessary and accurate information."" Call centers provided by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services underestimated ""the needed capacity to ensure that reliable answers could be provided"" and ""service representatives were not knowledgeable or failed to provide accurate information."" The Georgetown experts anticipated similar hiccups with the Affordable Care Act, noting that the country's experience with Medicare Part D suggested ""the experience will be far from perfect"" and ""problems were not always addressed as quickly or as thoroughly as critics would have liked, but fixes were usually found."" These days,nine in 10 seniors who utilize the program report they are satisfied with it. ""There's really a striking amount of similarity even though this time it's a far larger and daunting task. It's a fair comparison,"" said Jack Hoadley at the Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute and one of the authors of the study. ""Once something works its way through the problems, you forget the problems."" Still different But there are important differences between Medicare Part D and the Affordable Care Act that make the challenges facing the exchanges different. Because it was aimed at seniors and e-commerce was still relatively young, Medicare.gov was not intended to be the main hub for people to purchase and review plans, said David Brailer, the first National Coordinator for Health Information Technology under Bush. ""The issue with Medicare Part D is there were choices of 70 to 100 plans,"" Brailer said. ""People were overwhelmed with the choices, with the options available and didn't know how to navigate and pick one. I don't remember a conversation at all blaming any IT people. This was about how do you really navigate through all these choices."" Meanwhile, most people who logged on to healthcare.gov in the opening weeks couldn't even get far enough to review what options were available. Also, prescription drugs are a relatively small and easy-to-understand part of health care. Shopping for an insurance plan is more complicated. ""For those who did choose to enroll (in Medicare Part D) online, they checked out their options by typing in drugs they used, and once you did, you got an estimated out-of-pocket cost to make your comparisons. In the exchange world you have a full health care benefit to buy,"" Hoadley said. ""The drug cost is relatively predictable, certainly a lot more predictable than overall health costs. The challenge for this website is a lot greater, probably by a significant amount of magnitude."" And there's the political climate as well. When Medicare Part D passed, Democrats were not happy with the final bill and were critical of its botched rollout. But even then, they were generally supportive of its intended outcome and worked with constituents who had difficulty signing up or utilizing their new benefits. When Medicare Part D faced early troubles, many blue states came to its rescue. The New York Timesreportedin 2006 that ""about 20 states, including California, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and all of New England, have announced that they will help low-income people by paying drug claims that should have been paid by the federal Medicare program."" By contrast, not a single Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act, and in the years since it passed, the party has made its repeal a top priority. In the states, many Republican governors have bucked the Medicaid expansion and rejected offers to build their own insurance marketplaces, putting greater pressure on the federal government. Henry Aaron, a health policy expert at the Brookings Institute, said the opposition from Republicans has forced the Obama administration into a ""two-front war"" Bush did not have to fight. ""On the one hand, one must and should address the administrative problems that no one denies is plaguing the problem,"" he said. ""But you're also waging a war of public opinion against the hysterics of its critics."" Our ruling Israel said, ""Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out."" There definitely were problems, and in some cases, the parallels between the prescription benefit program's introduction and the Obamacare marketplaces are strikingly similar. While we also found some serious differences in the laws, we can't find fault with Israel's fairly general statement."

SOLUTION:
Things went wrong with the Medicare prescription D plan that George Bush rolled out.