Author: Jeff Yastine, Senior Correspondent

After meeting billionaire Richard Branson in the flesh for the first time on Thursday, a line of dialogue from the 1962 movie "Gypsy" comes to mind: "In this business, you either have it -- or you've had it."

The "it" is...charisma? Charm? Star Quality? In the best sense of the phrase, perhaps it's a "cult of personality" -- that ability of one individual to rally a group of people, all with their own opinions and personalities, and glue them together in a way that allows the achievement of seemingly impossible business goals.

Branson's name is usually mentioned in the same breath as another word: entrepreneur.

When you've covered the real-estate markets as long as I have, you begin to notice certain things. One thing I watch for in a down economy is what I like to call the "give up" phase. That's the point in an already-plunging marketplace where earlier buyers finally say "I give up" (or my likely "Get me out!!!"). And it's only after the "give up" phase that a market has truly bottomed.

Some think that "bottom" may now be in place for the nation's glutted condominium markets.

Many of the markets around the country all have one thing in common - a huge condo lender by the name of Corus Bank. Early in the decade, the Chicago bank plunged headlong into lending to condo developers and never looked back... until "the Boom" went "Ka-Boom." Corus became insolvent in September and was taken over by the FDIC. A bank named MB Financial got all the deposit accounts, while the FDIC figured out what to do with the portfolio of condo loans. Early this month, Barry Sternlicht's Starwood Capital Group won a 40-percent stake of that portfolio (the FDIC is keeping the rest), for the grand price of $550 million. The portfolio was once valued at up to $5.5 billion during the real estate boom.

If you go to Google, and punch in "overdraft fees," you'll see no shortage of news stories about people who lost track of their account balances, paid for some small item (the proverbial $5 latte), and found they overdrew their account. Overdraft protection is something banks have usually put in place for their customers automatically. In recent weeks, the FDIC and some in Congress have talked about reining in this practice. The banks, no dummies, are responding with their own voluntary changes.

One aspect of this story I didn't have time to go into on tonight's program is that overdraft fees -- however much maligned -- are something some consumers really want. Economist Mike Moebs, of Chicago-based Moebs Services, told me the biggest users of overdraft protection programs are typically people with low credit scores. It makes sense. These programs are a form of very, very expensive short-term credit. And with all the furor over high bank overdraft charges, some banks will probably emerge as "winners" in this controversy - the banks with lower overdraft protection fees.

My story tonight on NBR is about a trend called 'mobile coupons' - coupons you receive, not on paper, but on your cellphone. These coupons are typically sent via SMS (text-messaging), or by email (if you have a net-connected mobile phone). But it's not spam. You have to 'opt-in' to receive mobile coupons. This marketing tool is still quite new - JC Penney announced last month it would try out mobile coupons with some of its Houston-area stores. Sam's Club, the wholesale-club division of Wal-Mart, is also looking into mobile coupons. Eric Holmen, the president of mobile marketing firm SmartReply told me on the phone that only about 30 percent of the nation's national retailers have any kind of 'mobile coupon' strategy.

As someone who covers health care a lot, I've wondered whether it might be easier to write my stories if I could have the phrase "rapidly rising cost of health insurance" assigned to the F-1 or F-2 button at the top of my computer keyboard. After experiencing several decades in which the cost of health insurance rose faster than the rate of inflation, Americans have come to grudgingly expect that health insurance (if you're lucky enough to have it) will be significantly more expensive each year.

But is the "rapidly rising cost of health insurance" (there it is again!) truly a fait accompli? There's some evidence that it is possible to buck the trend. How? Well, in the past, companies typically looked at managing the cost of health benefits. Fair enough. But the companies which "buck the trend" take a different approach: instead of focusing on the health plan, they focus on the health of their workforce, and how to improve it.

Tonight's "Bill of Health" story on company health plans developed from a simple question: Why do companies offer health benefits at all? The average price of a company-provided health plan will rise by more than 10 percent in 2010 (according to the The Segal Company consulting firm), and when you consider companies pay somewhere between 75% to 85% of a plan's cost -- why do they even bother? After all, only two states (Massachusetts and Hawaii) mandate some form of coverage. For companies elsewhere, it's a voluntary effort.

The answer to the "why bother?" question is a bit of a history lesson. During World War 2, the nation's domestic war-related industries (building bombers, ships, and the like) needed lots of workers. But with so many men and women serving in uniform overseas, companies were competing for a limited supply of labor. In an ordinary world, companies might have been able to offer higher wages to attract workers, but US authorities froze wages by federal order (because of concerns about inflation).

The focus of healthcare stories these days is on the action (or inaction, depending on your viewpoint) in Washington and Congress. Yet the challenges companies face as the actually try to provide health care plan benefits to their employees is an issue that, in many ways, has been "under-reported" by those of us in the media. So that's what we were trying to focus on in tonight's Bill of Health. This report is the first of a 3-part series developed by photographer/editor Michael Malanga and myself.

Our idea was to focus on one company, preferably a small one (only a slim majority of companies with 9 workers or less still offer health benefits at all, compared to 99 percent of corporations with 200 or more workers), and to tell THAT company's health-insurance story. We wound up being put in touch with Kathy and Bob Latham, the owners of Latham Marine, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The first phase of the Credit CARD Act of 2009 goes into effect, Thursday.

Technically, the "CARD" part of the legislation, signed by President Obama in May, is an acronym for "Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure." The law means a host of consumer-friendly protections for card users, involving things like regulating retroactive interest rate hikes on old balances, controlling over the limit fees and offering longer advance disclosure periods for rate changes.

Tonight's story on the swelling enrollments of community colleges around the country strikes a personal note with me. I attended Edison Community College in Fort Myers, Florida for two semesters in 1982-83. It was a good way to start college close to home and to take all the usual freshman introductory courses before transferring to the University of Florida for the rest of my education. As the economy soured these past two years, it seems that a great many other students -- and parents, if they're paying the tuition bills -- are discovering what the nation's 1,195 community colleges have to offer.

What's interesting is the way community colleges have responded over the years to the increased demand for their services. Many are adding classrooms and instructors and offering additional classes through the internet. Some are also evolving into full-fledged four-year institutions. For instance, my old school, now known as Edison State College, began offering a few Bachelor of Science degrees seven years ago.

Medicare was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965. And, as I developed tonight's story on Medicare fraud, I learned the shenanigans of bilking dollars from the health care program began surfacing within a few years of the program's inception. It shouldn't be a real surprise. Whenever any government program is set up, dispending benefits and services to a large group of people, it's going to attract more than its share of people looking for ways to spirit away even more federal cash.

Part of the focus of tonight's story was trying to answer the question: Is it "worth it" to try to crack down on Medicare fraud? By most respects, actively enforcing fraud statutes as they relate to federal health care spending appears to very much be a worthwhile activity. The Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release today on the latest federal dragnet of fraud suspects. A team of federal agents working in New York, Louisiana, Boston, and Houston arrested 32 people. And, throughout the past two months, the federal Medicare Fraud Strike Force, composed of FBI agents and investigators from the DOJ and HHS, recovered $371 million from companies and individuals allegedly running Medicare-related frauds. The HHS Office of Inspector General, in it's 2007 report, said $797 million had been recovered during that fiscal year from Medicare fraud activity and returned to the Medicare Trust Fund.