Doctors

A man charged with shooting a prominent Kansas doctor who performed late-term abortions has been advocating through mailings from his jail cell that such killings are justifiable and communicating with individuals on the fringes of the antiabortion movement, weeks after suggesting others might be planning similar attacks. Scott Roeder, 51, is charged with first-degree murder and aggravated assault in the May 31 death of Dr.

Investigators trying to determine how Michael Jackson died are faced with the daunting task of creating an accurate medical biography for a superstar whose ailments, surgeries and doctors have been tabloid fodder for three decades. Jackson has seen more than a dozen doctors since 1993, according to various public records and accounts, and investigators are now collecting as much medical data about him as possible.

Armed with a search warrant indicating that Michael Jackson's death is being investigated as a manslaughter, a team of Los Angeles Police Department detectives and federal drug agents swooped into the Houston medical clinic operated by the pop star's personal physician Wednesday and seized documents and computer files. The warrant signed by a Harris County District Court judge and executed on the offices of Dr.

Detectives investigating Michael Jackson's death continued to target the pop star's personal physician Tuesday, searching the doctor's Las Vegas office for medical records, medications and prescriptions, and seizing cellphones and a computer hard drive from his home. Investigators are hoping the cellphones, along with phone records obtained in a previous search warrant, will provide information about the calls Dr.

Michael Jackson's personal physician left the performer alone and under the influence of a powerful anesthetic to make telephone calls the morning the pop singer died, according to three people familiar with the investigation. By the time the doctor had returned, Jackson had stopped breathing, the sources said. Dr. Conrad Murray, identified in court records as a suspect in a police manslaughter investigation, legally acquired the operating room drug propofol from a Las Vegas pharmacy and gave it to Jackson as a treatment for insomnia, said the sources, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because the investigation was ongoing.

Maneuvering to improve prospects for sweeping healthcare legislation, Senate Democrats hope first to win quick approval for a bill that grants doctors a $247-billion increase in Medicare fees over a decade but raises federal deficits in the process, officials said Wednesday. By creating a two-bill approach, Democrats can contend that the more comprehensive healthcare measure meets President Obama's conditions -- that it will neither add to deficits nor exceed $900 billion in costs over 10 years.

Anna Nicole Smith's boyfriend was urged to send her away for drug treatment but dismissed the advice, saying rehab "would kill her," the late model's onetime bodyguard testified Thursday. Smith overdosed on prescription medication months after a conversation recounted by bodyguard Maurice Brighthaupt at an ongoing preliminary hearing to determine whether prosecutors have sufficient evidence to try Howard K. Stern and two physicians for illegally furnishing the Playboy playmate with sedatives, opiates and other drugs.

The father of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter testified Friday that a physician told him the model's drug use was "under control" two years before her death from an overdose of prescription medication. Larry Birkhead said he believed the Playboy playmate was addicted to methadone and other painkillers, and told her internist, Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, in a 2005 conversation that he feared she might be obtaining additional pills from other sources. Kapoor said, " 'I believe we have that under control now,' " Birkhead told a judge presiding over a preliminary hearing to determine whether prosecutors have enough evidence to charge Kapoor and two others with conspiracy to illegally furnish prescription medication to Smith.

At least one country already has a healthcare plan roughly similar to the one President Obama and the Democrats have proposed, with universal coverage, a mandate that everyone buy insurance and a major role for private insurance companies: Switzerland. So I used part of a vacation last week to head for the Swiss Alps to observe the system in practice. Dr. Jean-Oscar Meile, 53, runs a tidy one-man practice in Melide, a suburb of Lugano in Switzerland's Italian-speaking south.

With budget anxieties pervading the congressional healthcare debate, the Senate on Wednesday sidetracked popular legislation to increase Medicare payments to doctors by nearly $250 billion over the next decade. Voicing concern about adding that much money to the federal deficit, a coalition of 12 centrist Democrats, one independent and all the Senate's Republicans voted to block consideration of the bill, at least for now. The goal of the bill -- to overturn a scheduled 21% reduction in doctors' fees under Medicare -- enjoys broad bipartisan support.