captioning sponsored by wnet >> sreenivasan: on this edition for sunday, december 10: president trump makes another push for roy moore in alabama. a new chapter for cryptocurrencies begins today. in our signature segment, trying to extend lives by getting more cancer patients involved in clinical trials. next on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz. the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.b.p. foundation. the anderson family fund. rosalind p. walter, in memory of abby m. o'neill. barbara hope zuckerberg.

corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. ank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thank you for joining us. it's just two days until the special senate election between republican roy moore and democrat doug jones in alabama. president trump again supported moore, this time by recording a robocall that will start reaching alabama voters today. in the recording, obtained by abc news, the president tells voters he needs moore's vote in the senate. >> roy moore is the guy we need to pass our make america great again agenda. >> sreenivasan: this follows an unambiguous endorsement from president trump last week and

the reinstatement of support of the national republican party. moore is hoping to overcome sexual misconduct allegations from nine women, many of whom were teenagers when moore was in his 30s. moore has denied the allegations and said in an interview today with "the voice of alabama politics" the accusations were defamation. >> i do not know them, i had no encounter with them, i never molested anyone and for them to say that, i don't know why they're saying it, but it's not true. >> sreenivasan: roy moore strategist dean young also defended moore, calling the accusations, "fake news." he said tuesday's election is about the president. >> this is donald trump on trial in alabama. if the people of alabama vote for this liberal democrat, doug jones, then they're voting against the president who they put in office at the highest level. >> reporter: but not all republicans are behind moore. senator tim scott said that if moore wins there will immediately be an ethics investigation. >> as far as i can tell the allegations are significantly stronger than the denial and i'm

going to let my decision be made by the breadth of information and evidence that i'm able to review during that process. >> sreenivasan: polls show the race within single digits, and while republican moore has kept a mostly low profile, with limited public events, democratic candidate doug jones is campaigning hard to turn out voters. >> people are ready for a change. people know that we have a unique opportunity in the state of alabama. >> sreenivasan: there are only 10 working days left for republicans to finalize their landmark tax plan and get it on president trump's desk before the end of the year. the president tweeted this morning saying the bill is getting closer. this week a conference committee will work to address the differences between the tax bills passed by the house and senate. some republicans have raised concerns over items such as the loss of deductions for state and local taxes. republican senator susan collins of maine has threatened to pull her support for the bill unless congress finds a way to stabilize health insurance markets. the current bill would eliminate

the individual healthcare mandate. today collins said she believes congress will take the necessary steps to keep healthcare costs down, but has not yet made a decision on her vote. >> i always wait until final version of the bill is brought before us before making a final decision to support it. there are major differences between the house and senate bills. and i don't know where the bill is going to come out. >> sreenivasan: the battle against six wildfires in southern california continues today. authorities there have lifted the evacuation order for parts of the city of ventra, but some residents of santa barbara county are being encouraged to leave their homes as high winds fan the flames in their direction. the largest "thomas" fire is only 15% contained, while the" creek" and "skirball" fires are 80% and 50% contained, respectively. 4,000 firefighters are now starting their second week battling the fires, and officials estimate that the costs of firefighting has already reached nearly $17.5 million.

the southern california fires have been blamed for one death and the destruction of 800 buildings. protests and violence continued across the middle east today against president trump's decision to recognize jerusalem as the capital of israel. in jerusalem, an israeli security guard was stabbed near the city's central bus station in what appears to be the first such attack since the president's announcement. clashes ensued between palestinian protesters and israeli military in other parts of the west bank and in gaza. thousands also took to the streets in morocco, indonesia and other parts of the muslim world. yesterday in cairo, arab foreign ministers demanded that the u.s. rescind the decision, saying it puts washington on the same side as the occupation. but this morning on cbs "face the nation," u.s. ambassador to the u.n., nikki haley, argued the jerusalem decision will actually help move peace negotiations along.

tell both sides to come together and say, "okay, you decide how you want to split up jerusalem." >> sreenivasan: texans are asking the e.p.a. for more transparency about superfund sites after hurricane harvey. read more at pbs.org/newshour. >> sreenivasan: the children's health insurance program, or chip, was put into place in 1997 to provide health insurance to children in families that make too much money to qualify for medicaid, but not enough to afford it on their own. last year alone, nearly nine million children were enrolled. politically speaking, the program has always received bipartisan support. but this september, federal funding for the program ran out. and, there is no agreement yet on capitol hill to find the approximately $14 billion a year it costs to run it. that leaves states who administer the program running out of funds and children with uncertain health insurance coverage as the end of the year approaches. joining me now from washington, d.c. to discuss this is diane

rowland, executive vice president of the kaiser family foundation. dr. rowland also advised congress as the inaugural chair of the congressionally- authorized medicaid and chip payment and access commission. so keep this in perspective for us. has this ever been in as much trouble or uncertainty before? >> this is the most uncertain time in chip's long history. it's always been reauthorized. sometimes there's been a debate about how long it should be reauthorized for but it was considered to be a slam dunk. >> sreenivasan: what's at the crux of of the disagreement? >> the crux of the disagreement has mostly been about timing to begin with. they were first going to do the aca repeal and replace law and they would get to chip. now it's mostly a problem of the house and senate has differed on how to pay for the bill. the house has made some provisions that reduce some medicare spending and other things to help offset the cost

of chip. the senate has not yet passed any of the pay for, now they're arguing but mostly it's that very little attention is put on a priority of getting this bill done. >> sreenivasan: what happens in the meantime? states, some them are kind of already over their budgets as the end of the year approaches. >> right now, health and human services department is trying to put out some of the unexpended funds from prior years to patch together a few of the state's programs but we know that 16 states will run out of funding by the end of january. and many of them are in the difficulty position of trying to figure out whether to send a bad letter at the holiday time to families, to say you ought to be prepared for us to have to terminate the program and to find other sources of coverage, some are trying to figure out if they can get their legislatures to do additional appropriations to cover it with state funds. but i think everyone is hoping that the congress will finally

move to get this program with universal support enacted and on its way back to covering millions of children l. some states have already sent out these letters, texas is one. what happens to the families who he are wondering what's going to happen next quarter especially with children with long term treatments? >> the real problem is the reason chip exists is health insurance coverage for many working family's of moderate means is unaffordable, and even if they have coverage at workplace they can't afford it with full family coverage. many families will be confused about where they can find affordable coverage, some may try to find coverage within the marketplace but that may not be available to them for an employer who offers coverage and others will have to look at

having their children unassured. >> sreenivasan: diane rowland from the kaiser family foundation, thanks for being with us. >> is thank you for having me. >> sreenivasan: last year, there were an estimated 1.7 million new cases of cancer diagnosed in the united states, and almost 600,000 people died from the disease. that made cancer the second leading cause of death in the u.s. and while more than 2,000 immunotherapy drugs are currently in development, a surprisingly small number of u.s. cancer patients participate in clinical trials, a key part of the research process. in tonight's signature segment, newshour weekend's christopher booker reports on efforts by researchers to change that, in the hope of extending and saving lives. >> reporter: andy daigle didn't think he would make it this far. a few years ago, the now 61- year-old business manager for

subaru in louisiana was diagnosed with kidney cancer, an illness that kills nearly 15,000 americans every year. >> august 13th of 2013, easy date to remember. he said, "you have a mass on your kidney." >> reporter: following multiple his kidney, daigle is removal currently cancer free, but the path he took to get there, is rare. he's among the less than 5% of american cancer patients who participate in clinical trials. daigle was part of a trial for the drug, pazopanib, which was being studied for people who have recurring tumors. being part of the trial meant extra care. but as with other patients, he didn't know if the trial would save his life, give him a bit more time to live, or do nothing at all. >> the trials, as they were explained to me, not a cure. it's just about life extension. like, if this would get you an extra six months, an extra year, an extra two years. because there is no cure for what i have, all we can do is manage. >> reporter: for his doctor, scott delacroix, how and why

daigle responded to the trial as he did is actually unknown. >> the effect on the individual patient for a clinical trial is never known. right now, he's, he's got no evidence of cancer. so he's doing well, okay. he's watching his grandkids grow up. the only way to answer that question though is not looking at one patient, mister daigle. it's, once the trials are fully accrued, what does a population of patients do? >> reporter: researching, developing, and getting approval for new cancer treatments is often a slow and arduous process. but without participation from patients like andy daigle, it takes longer to make medical advancements. while willingness to participate is one thing, access is another. about 90% of cancer patients are treated outside of major research hospitals, where the bulk of clinical trials occur. the smaller facilities they do visit for care often lack the funds or logistical support to run trials. >> i don't think it's an unwillingness on the patient's' part. i don't even think it's an

unwillingness on the physician's part. it's really a systems error, with the fact that patients don't have access, unless they are willing to travel. >> reporter: for years nearly all of the cancer clinical trials in louisiana were taking place at charity hospital in downtown new orleans. but then came hurricane katrina, the storm flooding the bottom floors of the hospital, forcing its closure and shuttering the state's primary cancer research center. for the researchers, the destruction presented an opportunity. with financial assistance from the national cancer institute, louisiana state university doctor augusto ochoa and his team helped re-envision louisiana's clinical trial infrastructure. rather than return to the centralized model, they looked to the broader oncology community in the state to build a network of researchers. >> after katrina, our only choice was to start working with community oncologists and community sites. i think this is a winning

approach to bring clinical trials to the patients. they cannot be exclusively provided in specialized cancer centers. >> reporter: what started with just a handful of sites, has grown to a much wider network. now called the gulf south ncorp clinical trials network, the group consists of 22 treatment facilities and more than 90 investigators, including doctor. delacroix's practice in metairie, louisiana. >> how are you doing? >> i'm doing great, sir. >> reporter: once a month 69- year-old ferdinand rosemain comes in to the clinical trial treatment for his stage four prostate cancer. living more than 30 miles from new orleans, he may not have had access to such a trial under the previous, centralized system. >> yep, that's it. >> reporter: the data collected from his trial is now shared with the louisiana group, a crucial part of this new research network. >> if we're able to push clinical trials into the community, it's going to give number one, researchers the

ability to answer questions that otherwise would take a lot longer to answer and number two, it provides access to these clinical trials that otherwise patients don't-- don't have access to. >> reporter: louisiana's effort has tripled the number of patients enrolled in clinical trials, the network now within reach of 80% of louisiana residents and even parts of mississippi. giving doctor david hanson and his patient's at the mary bird perkins cancer center in baton rouge access to the same trials and information as those in doctor delacroix's office. >> the patients come from about a ten parish area which surrounds baton rouge. many of them are medically disadvantaged. either have no access to health care or have medicaid that puts pretty significant restrictions on the kind of care they can get or the practitioners they can see. >> reporter: bolstered by a $5.6 million dollar grant from the national cancer institute in 2014, louisiana researchers are trying to improve access for minorities and rural residents. these are populations that represent a significant number of patients seen by doctors at the cancer center.

>> what has prevented minority groups and underserved groups from participating in clinical trials? >> well, you have to have access to care and access to a practitioner that's interested in doing that. and then often times if you participate in a clinical trial there are extra visits or extra issues that come along that make it more difficult. and so when a person looks at a menu and sees that they might have to come more often or on a very regulated basis because of the trial, they may turn that down. >> reporter: the baton rouge center has hired more researchers and nurses to assist with the trials and recruit more patients. 30% of the clinic's minority cancer patients are now enrolled in clinical trials. while louisiana is pushing participation, a new york city company believes the broader sharing of data holds tremendous promise. >> everybody wants better drugs faster. it's better for patients, it's better for physicians, it's better for pharmaceutical companies. one of the challenges in research is simply it's slow and expensive.

>> reporter: zach weinberg is one of the co-founders of flatiron health. launched in 2012, flatiron has 450 employees-- software engineers, nurses, and doctors-- who have developed what they call a learning healthcare platform. it's a cloud-based patient treatment database where every patient is anonymized, but their medical records are accessible to the clinicians, researchers, universities and drug companies who use it. the company has received funding from pharmaceutical companies and venture capital firms, including an arm of google's parent company. >> i think the electronic health record shift is a similar style infrastructure shift to the cell phone, which is we took all of these folks who essentially were disconnected from the grid, and we gave them a phone, and now they're fully connected. in health care what we're doing is something really similar. whether it's identifying patients for clinical trials, making treatment recommendations or even just helping physicians figure out what other docs are doing for similar types of patients. >> reporter: bobby green heads

flatiron's clinical development team of the electronic medical records, but he is also a practicing oncologist. every week he returns to his west palm beach, florida clinic to treat cancer patients and test the company's system himself. >> you actually can't do this without people who understand the science of oncology, without people who understand the practice of oncology, without people who really understand what happens in the real world, day to day, in an oncology clinic. >> reporter: often, doctor green is shadowed by other employees from flatiron, watching him interact with the software and patients. the record of what he's doing, entered into flatiron's database. >> every patient who walks in and out of that exam room on a different day has an experience, has something that they've gone through. and most of the time, no one has really learned from that experience. whether they had a particular mutation or a particular biomarker and had a really good outcome or a really bad outcome, that knowledge and that information really gets wasted. >> reporter: wasted, because before cloud computing, doctor

green says it was very difficult to compare large data sets, the information often siloed or stuck in the clinic or point of care. if he was able to access that information, connecting the data would had to have been done manually, and only if it cleared the necessary regulatory hurdles. flatiron's network allows him to make these comparisons which he hopes might one day allow him to understand why william lott has responded to his treatment the way he has. >> will, for example, has lived a lot longer than the average patient with the colon cancer that he's had, and continues to do really well, much better than i think any of us would've expected. >> reporter: doctor green has treated lott for 16 years. >> is there a biomarker that he has? does it have something to do with the fact that he had multiple myeloma before and got certain treatments related to that? we just don't know. but put that information together across a national database of cancer patients and it can be really valuable. >> reporter: five years since its launch, the company says 2500 oncology clinicians use and contribute to its database,

which currently has almost two million patients. that's one out of every eight cancer patients in the country. with the effort to bolster cancer research and data ongoing, not just in new york but in places like louisiana as well, the hope is new treatments will emerge sooner. >> you know, what i'm thinking is what i went through and the treatment, maybe sometime, five, 10, 15 years in the future, somebody else will get this, and what i helped to discover along the way would keep them from an early death, keep them living longer, keep their quality of life longer. if i was guinea pig for that, that's, you know, you can't ask for much more than that in life? >> sreenivasan: earlier this year on newshour weekend we brought you a story explaining cryptocurrencies, the digital assets that are not tied to any one country or bank, and the

technology beneath them called blockchain. but suffice it to say, whether people understand what they are or not, there are a lot of speculators betting on their success. that has driven their valuations through the roof in the past year. tonight is an important milestone in cryptocurrency because a traditional futures market, which allows someone to bet on an underlying asset without actually owning it will add bitcoin to the list of things investors can put real money against. joining me now here in the studio is nolan bauerle, an author at coindesk. >> this is a moment because does this mean that financial institutions and markets will take bitcoin seriously? >> it means it is a product they can access seriously. at the point, the bitcoin currencies that have started up in the ecosystem in the last few years. >> sreenivasan: it is a new experience. >> it is definitely a new experience and this would allow

all these financial institutions to get exposure to bitcoin using markets and exchanges they're used to using. >> sreenivasan: okay in the past when you think of futures markets, i think of the trading places, we're talking orange juice prices and pork bellies and all these kind of stuff. does that mean that wall street takes this seriously enough ton same level as oil and park and these other things they can bet on? >> it seems like they've gotten over the psychological gap, when they think of things ephemeral and not limited, bitcoin's one great inventions, made something natively digital and it made it property. it did that by the orchestration of technologies and the result is that something that's digital can be limited, it has counterfeit protection and can act as property. >> sreenivasan: okay. people the giant question you get at the thanksgiving table or the christmas table, what is

this really worth, who is standing behind it? there aren't blocks of gold somewhere in fort knox that stand behind this curnlz. currency. >> you could think of this as this beach front and when somebody realizes that there are only 21 million bitcoins, they want some of that property. you can think of the tree falling in the forest experiment, if a tree falls in the forest and a million cameras record that tree falling, they have rl knowledge whether that tree fell, how these computers working for things an authentici has attracted a tremendous amount of computing power and that computing power called the hash power, provinc approves prs

exist. >> just because the futures markets are covering it doesn't necessarily mean that we have a positive outcome. markets are what markets are they measure sentiment. no one has an idea, whether this should be worth more or worth less right? >> that's the beautiful thing the bitcoin until now, all the price has been determined by price discovery. what someone is willing to sell a bitcoin for, what someone is willing to buy a boirnt for. to have this tremendous hash power, this tremendous security around this network, they realize this is a limited mees of digital property and they want some. >> sreenivasan: we'll wake up tomorrow to see what's hatched in the currency futures markets. thank you. and finally tonight, a stark

washing about increasing tensions over nuclear weapons. it comes from the ahead of the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, the organization won this year's nobel peace prize and ebay stris finn accepted it in oslo today. >> where our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tan trim away. >> sreenivasan: that's it for rlg newshour weekend, i'm hari sreenivasan, and have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz.

the cheryl and philip milstein family. sue and edgar wachenheim, iii. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.b.p. foundation. the anderson family fund. rosalind p. walter, in memory of abby m. o'neill. barbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪

what is your view about the importance of nato and what should be done to improve nato? it can thank vladimir putin for giving it a rebirth in some respects. it is reported that the russians probably interfered with our presidential election. we're trying to undermine the trust of the people in our system. and that is a major issue. and what about kim jong-un? the challenge for this is that this is the crisis to prevent a madman, in many people's eyes, from getting a nuclear capability that can actually reach the united states. woman: would you fix your tie, please? well, people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixed, but okay. just leave it this way. all right. [♪] i don't consider myself a journalist. and nobody else would consider myself a journalist.