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News that Anthem Blue Cross is raising premiums 39% for some people in California comes at a convenient time for Democrats looking to regain a little health-care-overhaul momentum.

So it’s no surprise that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sent a letter calling on the company to justify the rate increase. After WellPoint, Anthem’s parent company, responded with this letter, Sebelius released a skeptical statement that cited WellPoint’s fourth-quarter earnings of $2.7 billion.

The owner of the Heart Attack Grill — home of the quadruple bypass burger pictured at right — is suing the owner of Heart Stoppers Sports Grill.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Heart Stoppers, in Delray Beach, Fla., opened a few weeks ago. Heart Attack Grill, in Chandler, Fla., has been around for years, according to the Phoenix New Times.

Here’s what the lawyer for the Heart Attack Grill guy told the South Florida Sun Sentinel:

In 2005, Illinois passed a law to cap noneconomic damages in medical malpractice suits. Today, the state’s Supreme Court struck down the law.

The court said the law that established caps — $500,000 in cases against doctors, and $1 million in cases against hospitals — violated the separation of powers clause in the state’s constitution.

California’s state Supreme Court threw out a law that limits how much medical marijuana patients can possess. Here’s the court’s ruling, which was filed yesterday.

The ruling is noteworthy in part because California already had some of the most permissive medical marijuana rules in the country; as we noted recently, the backers of New Jersey’s new medical marijuana law were eager to point out that the drug would be more tightly regulated in their state than in California.

The latest peace pact in the generics wars has been signed by AstraZeneca and Teva, shielding AstraZeneca’s mega-selling heartburn drug Nexium from Teva competition until 2014. Now the question is whether a similar deal with another generic maker — Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories — is far behind.

The CEO of Pfizer — a company that recently agreed to pay the largest criminal fine in U.S. history and pleaded guilty to a felony for misbranding a drug “with the intent to defraud or mislead,” — knows a thing or two about a brewing public backlash toward corporations.

Emerging markets may be essential to the growth of the global drug industry, but that doesn’t mean growth comes easily in the developing world. It’s become pretty common for countries to fight with drug makers over prices. And patent disputes can crop up anywhere, as generic manufacturers look to get in on the action.

Pfizer has faced both problems in the Philippines this year. The government put price controls on several branded, including Pfizer’s Norvasc and Lipitor, a few months back.

Even with the Medicare hospital trust fund projected to go bust in a few years, slowing the rise in Medicare costs is a political minefield for Congress. One idea that’s gained favor to give lawmakers some political cover is an independent, bipartisan commission that would make recommendations that Congress could approve or reject en masse, without amendments.

Florida’s never-ending tobacco litigation continued not to end this week. A woman in South Florida who smoked Benson & Hedges for 25 years sued Philip Morris and was awarded $300 million.

Most of the award — $244 million — was punitive damages. The balance was compensatory damages for the woman, who has emphysema, the Associated Press reports. She’s 61; she started smoking in 1968 and stopped in 1993.

There aren’t enough bodies to go around for everyone who needs a steady supply of cadavers for training and experiments. That shortage is helping turn the process of procuring cadavers into a functioning market, says a Harvard professor.