Bad Credit: How Payday Lenders Evade Regulation

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.thenation.com/article/159750/bad-credit-how-payday-lenders-evade-regulation


Sam Black woke up one morning not long after retiring to Charleston, South Carolina, with chest pains he didn’t realize would change his life. He took a shower and ate breakfast before his wife, Elsie, got him out the door to see his heart doctor. Within hours, the doctor cracked Sam’s chest open to do a triple bypass.

“They had the surgery early that morning,” Elsie recalls, piecing together the fragmented memory of someone who has survived a sudden trauma. Sam made it through the first operation all right, but later that night the hospital called Elsie. “We gonna have to take your husband back to surgery,” she says they told her. “Something went wrong.”

For the next seven weeks, Sam lay in a coma in the intensive care unit. Elsie says the doctor told her that when Sam comes to, “he might not know nobody. He ain’t gonna be able to drive.”

Today, roughly a decade later, Sam still labors over his words, speaking with a slow, gravelly slur. He sleeps with an oxygen mask and walks with more of a shuffle than a stride. But he walks and drives and lives independently. “They call him the walking miracle,” says Elsie. He also shells out more than $400 a month for prescriptions and owes his heart doctor what he estimates to be about $1,000 in co-pays. Elsie says she owes the same physician another $1,000. They’re both in the doctor’s office every few months for what feels like endless testing.

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