November 5, 1993

In a cluttered office at the campaign headquarters of Rudolph W. Giuliani, which is now papered with hastily prepared signs reading, "Office of the Mayor-elect," Peter J. Powers reflected on the abrupt transition from campaign manager to builder of a new administration. Amid the detritus of the campaign -- paper coffee cups, crumpled pamphlets, an ashtray of cigarette butts and, not unexpectedly, a growing stack of telephone messages -- Mr. Powers has suddenly found himself thrust into the center of the swirl of demands and pressures Mr. Giuliani faces as he puts together the city's first Republican administration in a generation. Seeking Common Ground There are the Republican Party leaders anxious to have a crack finally at City Hall. There is the Liberal Party, which gave Mr. Giuliani a ballot line to attract disaffected Democrats. There are the Democrats who switched teams in the name of fusion. There are blacks embittered by the campaign, and other constituencies like women and Hispanic residents. Not to mention Mr. Giuliani's myriad promises of change and inclusion and decisions based on merit.

When the talk at Ralph and Cleo Thompson's farmhouse social shifted from the cold, wet weather to the North American Free Trade Agreement, it quickly became apparent that here in the rural Midwest, where you stand on the agreement depends on what you grow. Mark Johnson picked at the roast beef on his plastic plate while explaining his opposition to the pact, which would eliminate tariffs and other trade barriers among Canada, Mexico and the United States.

While President Clinton's sweeping proposals would extend health care equally to all Americans, consumers and businesses in and around older urban areas like New York City are likely to find themselves paying substantially higher premiums for coverage than their counterparts elsewhere, and in many cases even higher than today. At its core, the Clinton plan would create a web of regional "health alliances" to pool the purchasing power of consumers and negotiate on their behalf for lower prices for health insurance. The Clinton system would not necessarily produce new costs -- indeed it is intended to operate more efficiently than what Americans have now -- but it will almost certainly reshuffle the deck in who has to pay the costs of medical care. Sharing Cities' Burdens The states, not Washington, are to create these new purchasing pools and decide their boundaries. What is critical, though, is that the regional alliances that include big cities with costly health care burdens will be forced to charge their residents more than those that do not.

Last year, a New York City school construction contractor suspected of evading Federal taxes made a bid for leniency, the authorities say. Seeking a softer sentence, he offered to help expose a bid-rigging scheme in the school construction and repair programs. The contractor secretly pleaded guilty and became an undercover informer for Federal prosecutors and for the city's School Construction Authority, the agency that awards school contracts. For their part, besides promising to put in a good word with the judge in his tax case, the authorities agreed to another benefit for the contractor: his company was allowed to obtain $10 million in school work, even though his tax conviction would normally have disqualified him from bidding for such contracts.

Struggling to convince Americans that its health care plan would save most people money, the Clinton Administration today produced its third set of predictions of how many Americans would pay more, or less, for health insurance. Last week, Donna E. Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, threw a scare into the Administration's friends and cheered its enemies by declaring that 40 percent of Americans who now have health insurance would pay more.