By Paul Kiel, ProPublica

This story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.

One day late last year, Katrina Sutton stood at a gas pump outside Atlanta and swiped her debit card. Insufficient funds. But that couldn't be. She'd been careful to wait until her $270 paycheck from Walmart had hit her account. The money wasn't there? It was all she had. And without gas, she couldn't get to work.

She tried not to panic, but after she called her card company, she couldn't help it. Her funds had been frozen, she was told, by World Finance.

Sutton lives in Georgia, a state that has banned payday loans. But World Finance, a billion-dollar company, peddles installment loans, a product that often drives borrowers into a similar quagmire of debt.

World is one of America's largest providers of installment loans, an industry that thrives in at least 19 states, mostly in the South and Midwest; claims more than 10 million customers; and has survived recent efforts by lawmakers to curtail lending that carries exorbitant interest rates and fees. Installment lenders were not included in a 2006 federal law that banned selling some classes of loans with an annual percentage rate above 36 percent to service members — so the companies often set up shop near the gates of military bases, offering loans with annual rates that can soar into the triple digits.

Installment loans have been around for decades. While payday loans are usually due in a matter of weeks, installment loans get paid back in installments over time — a few months to a few years. Both types of loans are marketed to the same low-income consumers, and both can trap borrowers in a cycle of recurring, expensive loans.

Installment loans can be deceptively expensive. World and its competitors push customers to renew their loans over and over again, transforming what the industry touts as a safe, responsible way to pay down debt into a kind of credit card with sky-high annual rates, sometimes more than 200 percent.

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By Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica

Last week's admission by Sheldon Adelson's casino company that it had "likely" violated provisions of the federal law barring U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials raises some intriguing questions. Chief among them: Which transactions by Las Vegas Sands and its far-flung subsidiaries are at issue?

Adelson, one of the world's richest men, came to public prominence during the 2012 campaign, when he and his wife Miriam donated at least $98 million to various candidates and groups. Included was $30 million for the Restore Our Future super PAC that supported Mitt Romney and $20 million to Winning Our Future, a super PAC that backed Newt Gingrich. Late in the campaign, Adelson asserted that federal investigators had targeted his company because of his political activity.

The terse statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Las Vegas Sands noted "likely violations of the books and records and internal controls provisions of the FCPA" (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) had come to light after three independent members of the board investigated "matters" raised by a February 2011 subpoena from SEC investigators and by an ongoing Justice Department inquiry.

In a news release issued Sunday, the company said the violations it had detected related to the "accounting provisions" of the law, not its "anti-bribery provisions."

Several news organizations have examined Las Vegas Sands' efforts to build its gambling business in Asia. The Investigative Reporting Program of the University of California, PBS Frontline and ProPublica published a story last year that disclosed the role of a local lawyer/legislator in overcoming regulatory hurdles in Macau, an autonomous region of China that is home to some of the company's most lucrative casinos.

Subsequently, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal wrote detailed stories that centered on Yang Saixin, a shadowy Beijing businessman who told the Times that Las Vegas Sands had paid him $30,000 a month until his firing in 2009.

According to the Times' account, the company provided more than $70 million to companies tied to Yang to construct a trade center in Beijing and sponsor a basketball team. Several million dollars were "unaccounted for" after those projects were shut down, the Times reported.

Las Vegas Sands has declined to elaborate on its filing but did tell the SEC that "in recent years, the Company has improved its practices with respect to books and records and internal controls."

GOP Congressman-wannbe-senatorTodd Akin was asked why he voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act at a town hall on Thursday. Akin's response suggests that a) he doesn't understand what federal law was prior to the Ledbetter Act, b)he doesn't understand what's in the Ledbetter Act, c) he's a misogynistic cretin who thinks it should be legal for employers to discriminate against women and d)that he will say he believes anything the GOP backer Koch brothers tell him to.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Why do you think it is okay for a woman to be paid less for doing the same work as a man?

AKIN: Well, first of all, the premise of your question is that I'm making that particular distinction. I believe in free enterprise. I don't think the government should be telling people what you pay and what you don't pay. I think it's about freedom. If somebody wants to hire somebody and they agree on a salary, that's fine, however it wants to work. So, the government sticking its nose into all kinds of things has gotten us into huge trouble.

It's been illegal to discriminate against women by paying them less since 1960s. The Ledbetter Act just made it easier for women to sue if they find out they're being discriminated against. Because, see, where Akin says that "If somebody wants to hire somebody and they agree on a salary, that's fine, however it wants to work," the reality is that employers don't generally say to women, "Hey, I'm going to pay you less than I'm paying men doing the same job as you." They just pay less, and keep quiet about it, because they're breaking the law. Which means it would be bad for them if the women they were discriminating against found out about it because there are consequences for breaking the law.

The only "freedom" Akin is talking about here is the freedom of businesses to break the law. Which he thinks is fine, because he doesn't think that equal pay should be the law, even in largely unenforceable theory. Just like he doesn't think there should be a minimum wage for anyone.

Note also how in this case "the government sticking its nose into all kinds of things" is not a good thing, according to Akin, but when it comes to women's vaginas more intrusive government is just fine.

Hospitals in Minnesota, and possibly elsewhere in the country have sunk to a new low in their debt-collection practices by employing collectors in emergency rooms, as well as labor and delivery rooms to pressure patients into paying up. The Minnesota attorney general revealed that Accretive Health, one of the nation's largest collectors of medical debt, regularly embedded debt collectors among hospital employees. The collectors, who looked like regular employees and sometimes had access to patients’ medical files, would demand payment before patients received treatment and sometimes discouraged them from getting emergency care at all.

Via:

Employees at Accretive’s client hospitals ask patients to make “point of service” payments before they receive treatment. Until she went to Fairview for her son Maxx’s ear tube surgery in November, Marcia Newton, a stay-at-home mother in Corcoran, Minn., said she had never been asked to pay for care before receiving it. “They were really aggressive about getting that money upfront,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Newton was shocked to learn that the employees were debt collectors. “You really feel hoodwinked,” she said.

While hospital collections at Fairview increased, patient care suffered, the employees said. “Patients are harassed mercilessly,” a hospital employee told Ms. Swanson.

Patients with outstanding balances were closely tracked by Accretive staff members, who listed them on “stop lists,” internal documents show. In March 2011, doctors at Fairview complained that such strong-arm tactics were discouraging patients from seeking lifesaving treatments, but Accretive officials dismissed the complaints as “country club talk,” the documents show.

The attorney general, Lori Swanson, cited two federal laws that are violated by Accretive's practices, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, a federal law requiring hospitals to provide emergency health care regardless of citizenship, legal status or ability to pay, and that by giving its collectors access to health records, Accretive violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Swanson further cited a state law that is broken when Accretive employees fail to identify themselves as debt collectors when accosting patients.

And don't assume that you need not worry about being confronted by debt collectors if you visit not-for-profit hospitals. The New York Times reports that just this week "Accretive announced it won a contract to provide “revenue cycle operations” for Catholic Health East, which has hospitals in 11 states."