Missouri Supreme Court gives Missouri voters the option to slap a 36% cap on payday loans

On Tuesday of this past week (July 31, 2012), the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that a ballot initiative capping the interest rate of small loans at 36% (including payday loans) will appear on the Missouri general ballot this coming November. This court decision is terrific news for the many poor, working-poor and struggling middle class people who have been victimized by predatory lenders throughout Missouri. I have previously discussed this hotly contested payday loan court case here. The payday loan industry had attacked this ballot initiative on numerous technical grounds, including constitutional issues, but in its July 31, 2012 decision, the Missouri Supreme Court shot down all of the arguments of the industry, holding that the payday initiative will go on the Missouri ballot in November. Here's the entire opinion of the Court. [More . . . ]

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Hiring someone else to serve your jail time

If you get into criminal trouble in China, you might be able to hire someone else to do your prison time. Here's an excerpt from Slate:

The practice of hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”

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How doctors contribute to the high cost of health care

At Better Medicine, Negoba points out how doctors contribute to the high cost of health care. Even though some doctors make high salaries (some specialists making extremely high salaries), the salaries are not the biggest part of the problem.

A doctor can be just as valuable as a controller of loss as a source of profit. In either case, the amount of money flow a doctor controls is easily 5-10 times the amount he or she makes in salary. Many larger systems with interests both at the office and hospital level will take losses on salary to retain a physician whose orders then net a profit in orders.

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