Health Care Reform Still a Struggle
BETTY NGUYEN, CNN ANCHOR: From the CNN center, this is CNN SATURDAY MORNING. Hello, everybody. It's October 17th. Good morning. I'm Betty Nguyen.</s>T.J. HOLMES, CNN ANCHOR: And hello to you all. I'm T.J. Holmes. It's 8:00 here in Atlanta, Georgia, where we sit. It's 5:00 a.m. for you folks waking up in Santa Monica. Wherever you may be, thanks for starting your day right here with us. Unfortunately we have to start with a story that's a bit ugly and a bit controversial and can you believe this is happening in 2009 in the state of Louisiana?</s>NGUYEN: All right, let me lay it out there for you. Justice of the peace refused to marry an interracial couple and it isn't the first time this official has refused to marry mixed couples. Civil rights groups and even the Louisiana governor want this justice of the peace fired. We are going to hear from the couple coming up.</s>HOLMES: And we want to hear from you. What do you think of this? What should happen to this justice of the peace? Also any issues, people weighing in this morning as well with your thoughts on interracial marriages. Please, send it in to us. You know where to find us, Twitter, Facebook, also at our blog.</s>NGUYEN: And I'm going to take you to the Maldives where government officials are having an actual meeting, check this out, it's underwater. Why? We'll tell you. In the meantime though we want to check some of the top stories that we are following for you right now. Three U.S. service members, they've been killed in militant attacks in Afghanistan. A statement from the international security force says two were killed in a roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan. The other was hit by an explosion in southern Afghanistan.</s>HOLMES: To Pakistan now where they've had two bloody weeks of militant attacks. The country now has launched an assault on the Taliban and al Qaeda. Civilians have been fleeing the area ahead of today's offensive. Army and intelligence sources say 28,000 troops are involved. This offensive is aimed at militants in south Waziristan. That's along the Afghan border. This comes after terrorist attacks over the past two weeks have killed over 175 people.</s>NGUYEN: Hurricane Rick picking up some steam in the Pacific ocean. The hurricane was just upgraded to a category four storm. That happened about an hour ago. Look at this monster storm right here. It is carrying maximum sustained winds of 135 miles per hour and it's about 250 miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico. We'll be following that for you closely. In fact, let's bring in meteorologist Reynolds Wolf right now who has been tracking Rick and Reynolds, there's some talk that maybe this could get up to a category five storm?</s>NGUYEN: All right, Reynolds, we'll be talking to you shortly, thanks.</s>HOLMES: Nobody said this thing was going to happen quickly, health care reform, not a sprint necessarily. It's a marathon, a long, painful partisan marathon and this weekend President Obama says he can actually see the finish line, but he knows still going to be a pretty tough struggle. Let's bring in our Kate Bolduan. Kate, I don't know if you're a runner, if you run marathons but I'm told that last mile or so is pretty difficult so I guess the president sees it kind of that way as well.</s>KATE BOLDUAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I will say just for my part the first mile is hard enough for me, T.J., but that is absolutely beside the point this morning. Yes, the president is working very hard this morning. He does seem optimistic about the chances for health care reform, but he is definitely trying to continue building momentum behind health care reform as the debate moves now out of congressional committee towards its next stage, which is a wider floor debate. Senate Democrats and White House negotiators are set to continue closed door deliberations about the various plans, various proposals. Next week the White House as you know wants health care reform passed by the end of the year and in his weekly radio and Internet address this morning, the president is highlighting progress so far. The Senate Finance Committee passed its version of a plan just this week, its much talked about plan but the president definitely says he is aware there is still a long road ahead. Listen here.</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's still significant details and disagreements to be worked out in the coming weeks and there's still those who would try to kill reform at any cost. The history is clear. For decades, rising health care costs have unleashed havoc on families, businesses and the economy and for decades, whenever we have tried to reform the system, the insurance companies have done everything in their considerable power to stop us.</s>BOLDUAN: The president as you hear right there, taking on the insurance industry this morning, saying very pointedly, in his address, accusing of it quote, filling the air waves with deceptive and dishonest ads, very strong words from the president this morning. The insurance industry and insurance industry trade report released just this week found that insurance premiums could possibly skyrocket under the much talked about Senate Finance version of health care reform, increasing much more than if no reform was passed at all. The White House Democrats and health care experts have blasted this report as an inaccurate report but you hear this morning, the president seeming to take off the gloves as he is fighting to move his number one domestic priority forward.</s>T.J. HOLMES: It's always scary when reporters start using the phrase taking the gloves off.</s>BOLDUAN: I had to.</s>HOLMES: Kate Bolduan for us in DC at the White House, Kate, thank you so much. We'll talk to you again. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, they are standing firm against the public option and in this week's GOP address, Texas Congressman Kevin Brady explains why his party could never go for the public option.</s>REP. KEVIN BRADY (R) TEXAS: The massive health care plan is being crafted behind closed doors in Washington will ultimately allow the government to decide what doctors we can see, what treatments the government thinks you deserve and what medicines you can receive. The Democrats' plans are loaded with new Federal mandates and higher taxes on insurance plans, treatments and equipment, all of which will be passed down to patients.</s>HOLMES: Now four of the five versions of health care reform, four of those five do have the public option. The one that was talked about as being the bipartisan one everyone is waiting for in the Senate Finance Committee, it does not have that public option. One Republican on the panel is Olympia Snowe. She was the only Republican that voted for that bill and tomorrow morning 9:00, sure bet, health care reform will be one of the things that John King will talk about in a rare interview with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. He's going to be talking about health care, the economy, foreign policy, all that on "STATE OF THE UNION" again Sunday 9:00 a.m. Eastern on</s>CNN. NGUYEN: There are still no concrete results in the Afghanistan presidential elections, now almost two months after people there went to the polls. Recounts, fraud questions, those have dominated the election news and now the Afghan ambassador to the U.S. says a runoff is likely. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked with CNN's Jill Dougherty about the outcome that she foresees.</s>HILLARY CLINTON, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: We're not positive what the election commission will recommend, but clearly, whatever their recommendation is, I believe should be followed and if that requires a second round, that is what should happen. I think that the president is well aware of all the permutations, what can happen in the election. It is likely that they will find that President Karzai got very close to the 50 plus 1 percent, so I think one can conclude that likelihood of him winning a second round is probably pretty high.</s>NGUYEN: Meanwhile in Washington, much of the focus regarding Afghanistan is on the military's request for 40,000 more troops. Our Pentagon correspondent Chris Lawrence looks at why that specific number of troops is needed.</s>CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): One hundred thousand American and allied troops are already fighting in Afghanistan. To understand why it's believed General Stanley McChrystal wants 40,000 more, you need to look at a map the way military strategists see it.</s>KIMBERLY KAGAN, ADVISOR TO GEN. STANELY MCCHRYSTAL: What 40,000 does is fill in the gaps around Kandahar, around Kost (ph), in Helmand (ph) province. It does not however cover the entire country.</s>LAWRENCE: Kimberly Kagan is an adviser to McChrystal. She says it's the minimum number to root out the Taliban and identify and protect potential Afghan partners, but the military's own counter insurgency ratio dictates it could take well over half a million troops to secure Afghanistan's 33 million people. (on-camera): But General McChrystal is not applying this ratio to all of Afghanistan. He feels certain parts of the country are peaceful enough, like the north, or just not as important, like the west, that they don't need the same number of counter insurgency fighters as these areas do.</s>KAGAN: And that's what gets him from a figure of hundreds of thousands of troops down to a figure such as 40,000 or 60,000 troops.</s>LAWRENCE: Kagan says McChrystal would use those troops to turn the tide so the Taliban doesn't control every other town. She says 10,000 or even 20,000 troops just aren't enough.</s>KAGAN: It's not as though we can simply plug half as many holes with half as many troops and somehow seize the initiative from the enemy. On the contrary, half as many troops will probably leave us pinned down as we are.</s>LAWRENCE: The problem is, roughly 25 million Afghans live in thousands of small, rural villages, scattered all over an area the size of Texas. Up to 80 percent of the population could still be out of reach for coalition troops. (on-camera): So when 30,000 American troops surged into Baghdad, that's where one out of every four Iraqis lived. Even if you take the top 30 most populated areas of Afghanistan, you still only account for 20 percent of the population. That's how rural and spread out it is. Chris Lawrence, CNN, Washington.</s>HOLMES: All right, things are a little, you know in politics can be a little whacky sometimes. We wonder what our politicians are doing. Look at what the politicians are doing in Maldives. They're having a cabinet meeting underwater. Maldives is an island nation southwest of Sri Lanka.</s>NGUYEN: All right, so let's give you the 411 on why this is all going down underneath the shoreline there. It's meant to attract international attention to global warming and in fact 13 officials plus the president there all in scuba gear and they in fact, were using hand signals to communicate with each other, because that was one of the first things they were asking about is like, OK, you're going to have a meeting underwater. How in the world are they talking to each other? Well there you see and this is 20 feet below the surface, again, I don't know how much of this meeting was actually productive, except for the fact that it is drawing attention to it, because we're airing it and their whole goal was to bring attention to global warming.</s>HOLMES: They're talking about global warming and changes around the world to our climate and they talk about sea levels and they say sea levels there are rising, which means that their island is literally sinking. So the point being I guess that one day...</s>NGUYEN: ... they'll all be underwater.</s>HOLMES: Be underwater. It takes a while to connect the dots, but we did it now.</s>NGUYEN: We did it. All right, are people getting this though, dress codes in school. That's nothing new, but one all-male college may be breaking new ground with their list of banned items.</s>HOLMES: Let me just say I love this story. I love what they're doing. I'm glad they're doing it. Yes, you need to dress a certain way and present yourself, that story has me fired up.</s>NGUYEN: Especially when you look at what some of them have been wearing.</s>HOLMES: Yes.</s>NGUYEN: What are you thinking?</s>HOLMES: And the men who have walked on that campus before them.</s>NGUYEN: And the history there.</s>HOLMES: And the history, yes. We'll tell you about it in just a second. Also we're going to be taking stock of the stimulus. Josh Levs has that for us, good morning to you sir.</s>JOSH LEVS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you guys. We got brand new figures that have come out showing where some of those billions are actually being spent, how to find out what's happening in your city with that money. We have it right here.