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"Companies submitted bids for the Project Aura job. The research agency ... chose Newport Medical Instruments, a small outfit in Costa Mesa, Calif"

This is the problem. Instead of allowing several companies to compete for a large order of new ventilators, the $ were given to one company to be spend on design not on the product.

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No, that is specifically not the problem. The problem is that the company had demonstrated a working design and was near production... but then the wheels of finance (by way of publicly traded company) stepped in with a profit-only motive.

If three companies were all competing, there's absolutely no guarantee that each of those three would not have been bought in the same way. No large company would have gone for such a contract unless it had no other way to make money; there wasn't enough profit incentive.

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