Doctors

The American Medical Assn., after 60 years of opposing any government overhaul of healthcare, is now lobbying and advertising to win public support for President Obama's sweeping plan -- a proposal that promises hundreds of billions of dollars for America's doctors. Of all the interest groups that have won favorable terms in closed-door negotiations this year, the association representing the nation's physicians may have taken home the biggest prizes, including an agreement to stop planned cuts in Medicare payments that are worth $228 billion to doctors over 10 years.

Winding up in the emergency room is bad enough. But the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that patients no longer have to worry about getting billed for emergency treatment charges that their HMOs fail to pay. Health maintenance organizations and patient advocates hailed the decision as an important protection against gouging by hospitals and physicians. But doctors said it would encourage greedy HMOs to underpay them and that that could put emergency rooms in jeopardy.

Frustrated emergency room doctors filed a class-action lawsuit against the state Tuesday, saying that California's overstretched emergency healthcare system -- which ranks last in the country for emergency care access -- is on the verge of collapse unless more funding is provided. Across the state, scores of hospitals and emergency rooms have shut their doors in the last decade, leading to long waits, diverted ambulances and, in the most extreme cases, patient deaths.

When the identity of Nadya Suleman's fertility doctor was made public this week, the Internet lit up with angry commentary. Many called for Dr. Michael Kamrava to be stripped of his medical license -- or worse -- for providing the fertility treatments that led to Suleman's 14 children, including last month's octuplets. Rosalind Saxton had a different reaction.

After a vigorous debate among experts, the state medical board this week dismissed accusations of negligence against a perinatologist at Kaiser Permanente's Fresno Medical Center who was involved in two tragic deliveries. The Medical Board of California had accused Dr. Hamid Safari of mishandling the procedures. One child died in the delivery room in April 2005, and the other died months after her January 2004 birth.

In its first season without "ER," NBC is mounting two new medical shows. Neither focuses on doctors, however, which some may consider a relief. (I try not to focus on doctors myself.) "Trauma," which begins next week, is about EMTs in San Francisco; "Mercy," which begins tonight, follows a group of Jersey City nurses whose often messy private lives are interrupted regularly by their often thankless jobs. Haughty patient: "Nurses! What are you good for anyway?" Nurse Veronica: "Well, we do try to keep the doctors from killing you."

The request for drugs for Anna Nicole Smith slid off the fax of a Valley Village pharmacy five days after the model's son had died in the Bahamas. A psychiatrist wanted 300 tablets of methadone, two types of sedatives, a muscle relaxer, an anti-inflammatory drug and four bottles of a painkiller nicknamed "hospital heroin," unsealed court records show. The amount and combination alarmed the pharmacist, who later recalled thinking, "They are going to kill her with this." He phoned Smith's internist and said he had no intention of filling a prescription that amounted to "pharmaceutical suicide," according to court documents.

An Arizona man who allegedly stole the identity of a San Francisco physician and posed as a doctor running a West Los Angeles sperm bank has been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting two men, authorities said. Jeffrey Lynn Graybill, 40, of Phoenix is accused of pretending to be "Dr. Robert Richardson" and soliciting sperm donors for the nonexistent Fertility Clinic of West Los Angeles, said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.

In the Lodz ghetto in Poland, home to as many as 204,000 Jews during World War II, there were 170 doctors, as well as a few nurses and midwives, according to diaries and memoirs. Like all the others, they lived with the daily terror of being shipped off to a death camp. There was almost no food, no medication and certainly no X-ray machines, laboratories or any of the other accouterments that we think of as essential to medicine today. And yet, when there was nothing to give the sick, the Lodz doctors did find something.

A doctor who treated AIDS patients admitted to watering down medications and pleaded guilty to fraud charges, the U.S. attorney's office announced Thursday. Dr. George Steven Kooshian, who practiced in Orange and Los Angeles counties, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Santa Ana federal court to a total of four counts of billing fraud and making false healthcare statements. The charges stem from Kooshian's treatment of two patients in 2000.