March 5, 1984

Many American employers say the cost of medical care, which has risen more than tenfold in the last two decades, has become an oppressive burden to their businesses. Lee A. Iacocca, chairman of the Chrysler Corporation , one of the companies hardest hit by workers' growing medical bills, said that if the nation's system of health care is not revamped, ''You'll see a lot of broke companies.'' The Reagan Administration has tried to cope with the inflation in health-care costs by imposing limits on Federal Medicare payments. Several other large corporations, including General Motors, Ford, Citibank and W. R. Grace, are trying to limit their health costs by pressing workers to pay a larger share of their own medical bills. The workers are resisting, arguing that health benefits are a right they won in collective bargaining.

Once upon a time, long before critics talked of ''intertextual analysis,'' before feminism and Marxism, before Jung and Freud, some simple folk sat in circles and told stories about cinder maids and princes and houses made of sugar and cake and snow-white birds that helped little children find their way out of the great green forest. As the years passed, the stories continued. Good triumphed over evil, darkness became light, sadness surrendered to the happily ever after. In time, these simple folk tales and fairy tales became literature and were taken up by scholars who, as is their custom, began to read between the lines.

The climate for private bank lending to Eastern European nations has begun to improve in the first upturn since the Polish debt crisis of 1981. Most Eastern European nations, not following Poland's lead, have seen their debt situation improve because of better trade balances and the steps they have taken to reorganize their internal economies. ''The upturn has already occurred,'' said Donald Green, a vice president at Chase Manhattan Bank. He added, ''We'll probably see quite a big year in 1984 in net lending to Eastern European countries who survived the crunch, and to the Soviets.'' He said he expected a small surge in lending by American banks, but that the bulk of financial activity with the Eastern bloc would come, as it has traditionally, from Western Europe.

The movements were sudden and swift. A man at the corner of Delancey and Clinton Streets on the Lower East Side shoved a small envelope into a slot that had been chiseled into the trunk of a gray sedan parked at the curb. Soon two large envelopes emerged from the hole. The man disappeared down the street and the car sped off. The exchange of drugs for cash had taken 30 seconds, and when it was over, the scene of a crime had vanished.

A caption in some editions of Sports Pages on Saturday misidentified the Knicks player in the picture. He was Marvin Webster.