A good profile of Peter Orszag in the New Yorker:
The deficit spectre has loomed over every major debate. The most contentious issue has been health care. The Administration was divided into three camps. According to White House officials, a group including Vice-President Biden and David Axelrod, a senior adviser, and led by Summers was hesitant to make a major push on health care this year, especially given the fact that a full plan would cost roughly a trillion dollars over ten years. Then, there was Tom Daschle, the former South Dakota senator who was Obama’s original choice to lead the health-care-reform team, and his staff at the White House and at the Department of Health and Human Services. In January, Daschle became alarmed that health care would be either absent from the Obama budget or not given the emphasis that Obama had promised. (When Daschle went to see Rahm Emanuel to register these concerns, the President, who had been quiet during the early health-care meetings, stopped by and reassured Daschle of his commitment.) Orszag came to the debate with a third option, which combined Summers’s concern about deficits and Daschle’s insistence that Obama tackle health care this year. He argued that health-care reform is deficit reduction.
