There's a price tag of $1.6 trillion on President Obama's plan to overhaul health care, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Takeaway talks with Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa. He's the ranking member of the powerful Senate Finance Committee and one of the chief critics of the plan's spiraling costs.

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Major League Baseball is losing an icon. Don Fehr is retiring after 26 years. He's not a second baseman or even a coach. He's the executive director of the Major League Baseball Player's Association and on his watch a lot has happened in the world of baseball. Will he be remembered for helping players gets rich or allowing steroid use to proliferate? The Takeaway's Sports Contributor Jeff Beresford-Howe talks with John Hockenberry about the legacy of Don Fehr.

To see some statistics on changes in baseball during Fehr's career, watch the video below.

President Obama's press conference yesterday touched on a lot of issues facing the nation. To help recap the highlights of the speech and forecast what challenges the President will face in the coming months we turn to The Takeaway's Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich and Julie Mason, White House correspondent for the Washington Examiner.

In case you missed the speech, here it is:

In his speech yesterday, President Obama condemned what he called the Iranian authorities' “unjust suppression” of protests against the contested election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's to power. President Obama added that the world had been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments, and mourned the loss of innocent lives. It was the strongest statement the president has made on the crisis in Iran; there hasn't been an official Iranian reaction yet. For more, we turn to Baqer Moin, the former head of the BBC's Persian service, and author of Khomeini: Life of the Ayatollah.

A U.S. drone killed more than 50 people in missile strikes on a Taliban stronghold area of Pakistan. The strike happened in South Waziristan, where the people were attending the funeral of a militant commander who had been killed in an earlier strike. The attack came as the Pakistani army prepared a new offensive in the area. We turn to Rob Watson, the BBC's defense correspondent, for more of the story.

When President Obama spoke to the nation yesterday he touched on everything from the ongoing political turmoil in Iran to health care here at home to his trouble quitting smoking. These are issues that affect communities all over the country, so we're checking in with some of our partner stations this morning to help us take the pulse of America. The Takeaway is joined by Jerome Vaughn, news director at WDET in Detroit, Joshua Johnson, anchor with WLRN Miami Herald News, and Marc Steiner who hosts the Marc Steiner show on WEAA in Baltimore.

After six years of occupation, U.S. troops are about to pull out of Iraqi cities. Amid increasing violence, including a series of explosions across Baghdad and a suicide truck bombing last weekend, is Iraq is ready to handle its own security when the 133,000 U.S. troops depart? Rod Nordland is the Foreign Correspondent in the Baghdad Bureau for our partners The New York Times, and he joins us now to help answer that question.

For more, read Rod Nordland's article, Spate of Attacks Tests Iraqi City and U.S. Pullout, in The New York Times.

As President Obama and Congress work together to craft a new health care plan for the nation, we are talking to health care leaders across the country about their ideas for change. Today, we look for models beyond our borders. Uwe Reinhardt joins us to assess what we can learn from other countries. He is a leading health economist, a professor of Economics at Princeton University, and a contributor to the Economix blog for our partners The New York Times.

TV ads featuring "Harry and Louise" helped defeat the Clinton health plan in 1994. The ads were funded by a group of insurance companies who feared they would be cut out of the market by larger firms:

As part of our ongoing health care coverage we’ve been talking to medical leaders and thinkers who are working within the system, or hoping to change it. But on the other side of the equation is the consumer. We're joined by Precious Lowe for her thoughts on how she would like to see President Obama and Congress reform health care. Even though she is fully employed, health insurance is something she has to pay for out of pocket.

Elizabeth Warren, the Chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel that monitors how the government spends its TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money, has spent her career advocating for the American consumer. She supports the administration's proposed consumer financial protection agency, saying that consumers need clearer descriptions of their credit cards' rules and of financial products that they might invest in. The Takeaway talks with Elizabeth Warren about her hopes for the new consumer protection agency.

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President Obama's press conference covered a lot of topics yesterday—including, unexpectedly, his continuing struggle to quit smoking. To help us understand just how hard it is for some people to break their nicotine addiction, we turn to Dr. Richard Hurt, Director of the Mayo Clinic's Nicotine Dependence Center.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has stumped his constituents, the media, and even his wife. He disappeared for five days with no contact with his family, staff, or state leaders. While his staff claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, a news report this morning says he was actually vacationing in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bad geography? Or something else? Yvonne Wenger, a reporter for the South Carolina Post and Courier, joins The Takeaway with more of the story.