December 27, 1993

Four years ago, the Government got rid of a state-controlled company that lost $25 million a year turning out smoky buses and trucks that could barely climb Mexico's mountains. That same company, Consorcio Grupo Dina, is now operated by a team of businessmen and has an annual profit of $90 million on a new line of trucks and buses. It is one of five Mexican companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

In May 1967, Jules and Rachel Lubell paid $17,000 for a painting by Marc Chagall. Except for two occasions when they lent it for gallery shows, it has hung, undisturbed, in their Fifth Avenue apartment. That may soon change. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, claiming that the painting -- a gouache, or a kind of watercolor -- was stolen from it in the mid-1960's, has sued Mrs. Lubell, now a widow in her early 70's, demanding that she either return it or pay the museum the $200,000 or more that the Guggenheim says it is worth.

In a significant policy change, Clinton Administration officials say they will not prod Medicare patients to join health maintenance organizations, in part because they have discovered that the Government loses money on people enrolled in such private health plans. Bruce C. Vladeck, head of the Federal Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, said he would not aggressively promote H.M.O.'s for beneficiaries until he could guarantee consistent high-quality care and had a better way of paying for it. The Problem With H.M.O.'s "Our payment methodology is so primitive that it doesn't save money," Mr. Vladeck said in an interview. "We are losing money on H.M.O. patients. Before we undertake aggressive promotion of H.M.O.'s for Medicare beneficiaries, we have to make progress on both issues: payment methodology and quality assurance."

With the announcement this month that the National Cancer Institute, a powerful force in the health care debate, would no longer recommend that women in their 40's have regular mammograms, the emotional debate over such precautionary screenings for breast cancer is shifting from a purely medical question to one of cost. Should insurance companies continue to pay for the tests in younger women, and should President Clinton's health plan hold fast to its proposal to refuse payments for routine mammograms in women under 50?

In this 750-year-old village carved out of the dense forests of eastern Brandenburg, game is so plentiful that hunters can fill orders for deer and wild boar in a matter of hours. The nearest city is Cottbus, 20 miles away, and Dresden is 40 miles to the south. Life was very quiet here until the 1930's, when giant machines began tearing up the countryside to extract the high-quality coal that lies in thick deposits 30 to 80 yards beneath the surface. During the Communist era, coal from this region stoked homes and factories throughout eastern Europe. In Altdobern, a community of 3,800, two-thirds of the workers were connected to the coal industry. But the collapse of the Communist alliance, and the access to more efficient western producers and alternative fuels, has meant slow death for the industry.