FYI: Interesting to note Wa Po going after this like a Pit Bull on a ham bone - must be the Jeff Bezos Factor ...
One of our younger relatives with a real degree to get and keep jobs, is/was a construction project manager for companies that do large projects.
About 10 years ago he was wooed by a competitor company to come to work for them as a lead cpm for a large part of a big state.
Besides his negotiations re salary, benefits, time off and bonuses, he demanded that under his leadership, there would be zero new contracts with any governmental agency unless they paid up front.
That was a big sticking point, and the company fnally agreed.
He came to work and after a couple of years, finally got all the late and unpaid bills from various governmental agencies collected.
Then, the financial meltdown happened, and the company struggle to stay afloat due late and poor pay from the various governmental agencies in the rest of the area covered by his company..
He basically kept the company afloat as his area was in the black and stayed there. Two years ago, he was promoted to a senior vp level. They wanted him to bring his no governmental contracts unless they paid up front to the rest of the company.
The company is doing very well now using his philosophy.
“Larry Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, and Peter Orzag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, had just received a pointed four-page memo from a trusted outside health adviser. It warned that no one in the administration was “up to the task” of overseeing the construction of an insurance exchange and other intricacies of translating the 2,000-page statute into reality.
Summers, Orzag and their staffs agreed. For weeks that spring, a tug of war played out inside the White House, according to five people familiar with the episode. On one side, members of the economic team and Obama health-care adviser Zeke Emanuel lobbied for the president to appoint an outside health reform “czar” with expertise in business, insurance and technology. On the other, the president’s top health aides — who had shepherded the legislation through its tortuous path on Capitol Hill and knew its every detail — argued that they could handle the job.
In the end, the economic team never had a chance: The president had already made up his mind, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid. Obama wanted his health policy team — led by Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform — to be in charge of the law’s arduous implementation. Since the day the bill became law, the official said, the president believed that “if you were to design a person in the lab to implement health care, it would be Nancy-Ann.”