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Political life is full of comeback stories, but few are quite as dramatic as the boomerang that Scottish nationalists have experienced over the last six months.

Last September, the Scottish National Party lost a vote on whether to break away from the United Kingdom.

Now, membership in the SNP has quadrupled, and that unexpected turn of events means that this party, dismissed as a loser last fall, could determine who becomes the next prime minister after British elections in a few weeks.

People who wanted Scotland to leave the U.K. had waited their whole life for last year's vote. Then the long, slow buildup to Scottish independence deflated with a massive whoosh as the nationalists learned that they had lost by 10 points.

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Sturgeon has delighted the audiences during a series of televised debates. Here, she is seen with British Prime Minister and Conservative leader David Cameron at the first, on April 2, after which newspapers hailed her as "Queen of Scotland" and "Surgin' Sturgeon." Ken McKay/ITV via Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Ken McKay/ITV via Getty Images

Sturgeon has delighted the audiences during a series of televised debates. Here, she is seen with British Prime Minister and Conservative leader David Cameron at the first, on April 2, after which newspapers hailed her as "Queen of Scotland" and "Surgin' Sturgeon."

Ken McKay/ITV via Getty Images

The morning after the referendum, Edinburgh librarian Robyn Marsack looked to the future with a sigh and a note of hope.

"There's also a feeling that something has been unleashed that can't be held back now," she said. "It's out there."

At the time, that sounded like an attempt to put a positive spin on a painful defeat. Then thousands of new members started signing up for the Scottish National Party.

"It did come as a surprise," says political scientist Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. "I don't think any of the ever-present political pundits had predicted this."

"I think the reason it happened is that, clearly having voted to stay in the United Kingdom, the people of Scotland could signal that they were still very interested in degrees of freedom and autonomy, if not quite independence," he says.

For decades, the U.K. was dominated by two big parties: Labour and Conservatives. That's still true, but neither is expected to break 50 percent in next month's election. That leaves an opening for a small party to be kingmaker. And right now, the SNP is out-performing all the other small parties.

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Demonstrators march in Glasgow, Scotland, to call for the scrapping of Britain's Trident nuclear weapons program on April 4. Opposition to Trident is a cornerstone of the SNP's platform. Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images

Demonstrators march in Glasgow, Scotland, to call for the scrapping of Britain's Trident nuclear weapons program on April 4. Opposition to Trident is a cornerstone of the SNP's platform.

Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images

If they do as well as expected, the Scottish nationalists could pull the new government to the left. The party wants more spending on social services, and the SNP opposes Britain's nuclear weapons program, Trident.

"It's often asked of me, 'Is Trident a red line?' " party leader Nicola Sturgeon said in one recent debate, "Well here's my answer: You better believe Trident is a red line."

The audience roared. That's become typical of Sturgeon's performance in these debates. During one faceoff among seven leaders, people searched for her name more than any of the others. After the debate, the Daily Mail hailed Sturgeon as "Queen of Scotland," while the Belfast Telegraph ran the headline: "Surgin' Sturgeon." One of the most Googled questions during the debate was "Can I vote for the SNP?"

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It's a development that Charlie Jeffrey, a politics professor at Scotland's University of Edinburgh, calls "very interesting."

"A party which is Scottish and which can only stand in Scotland, [people asking], yeah, can we have some of that?" he says.

"It's a strange situation, isn't it?" he says, "When the party in the campaign that lost is now on such a political high."

Sturgeon has joked that her party climbed so fast, she might be experiencing altitude sickness. But her opponents have not let voters forget that the party was founded on a belief that Scotland should be an independent country.

People often referred to last year's independence referendum as a "once-in-a-generation" vote. Now that the SNP is on a rocket trajectory, many are wondering whether another vote could come much sooner.

Sturgeon recently brushed aside such speculation.

"A vote for the SNP in this election is not a vote for another referendum," she said. "It is a vote to make Scotland's voice heard much, much more loudly."

But then she said she wouldn't entirely rule out another Scottish independence vote, either.

In his home in Lahore, Pakistan, Saleem Khan holds up his late father's violin. There are no strings, the wood is scratched and the bridge is missing.

"There was a time when people used to come to Lahore from all over the world to hear its musicians," the 65-year-old violinist says in the new documentary, Song of Lahore. "Now we can't even find someone to repair our violins."

Pakistan's second largest city once had a booming film industry and a flourishing music scene. Classical musicians, with their tabla drums, violins and sitars, would perform on stage, in movies and in crowded markets.

Then in 1977, Pakistan's sixth president, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, banned live music altogether. That left classical musicians like Khan struggling to get by. Many of his fellow artists fell into poverty.

Today the ban has eased, but people mostly tune into pop music, says Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, an Oscar-winning filmmaker and journalist based in Karachi and a director of the film. Classical music in Pakistan has virtually died, she says.

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Saleem Khan, 65, teaches his grandson how to play the violin in their home in Lahore. Courtesy of Asad Faruqi hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Asad Faruqi

Saleem Khan, 65, teaches his grandson how to play the violin in their home in Lahore.

Courtesy of Asad Faruqi

But seven musicians in Lahore are trying to change that, one performance at a time. Obaid-Chinoy's film follows the musicians on their quest. The documentary premiers Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

The musicians are part of Sachal Studios Orchestra, a group of about 20 Lahore-based artists who fuse traditional Pakistani music with jazz. They work in a small rehearsal room in Sachal Studios, at the heart of the city. There, they create new songs and rehearse for concerts in effort to keep traditional music on the public's radar.

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Oscar-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, left, co-directed Song of Lahore with producer Andy Schocken, right. Courtesy of Wasif Arshad hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Wasif Arshad

Oscar-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, left, co-directed Song of Lahore with producer Andy Schocken, right.

Courtesy of Wasif Arshad

When they started in the early 2000s, the ensemble went largely unnoticed. Then in 2014, they performed in New York City with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. This appearance earned them recognition in the global jazz scene. Since then they've been performing around the globe and in Pakistan.

The documentary zooms into each musician's personal life before their success. For example, Nijat Ali, 39, is tasked to take over as conductor of the ensemble when his father dies. Saleem Khan, the violinist, struggles to pass on his skills to his grandson before it's too late. And guitarist Asad Ali, 63, tries to make ends meet by playing guitar in a local pop band.

The biggest challenge, Obaid-Chinoy says, was getting them to open up. "The musicians are very proud," she tells Goats and Soda. "When I first began filming them, they hid how tough life was for them, and it took me a long time to pry that open."

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For the 36-year-old journalist, the three-year project hits close to home. "I grew up with my grandfather's stories of a very vibrant Pakistan, where on the streets [of Karachi] you would have bands playing," she says. "When I was young I would watch [the performances] on television. But when I was a teenager, all of that was lost, and I never experienced the appreciation that he did."

The film is co-directed by filmmaker Andy Schocken. He wants the video to show people in the West a different side of Pakistan. "Typically, people only see stories about terrorism and sectarian conflict," he says. "So it's important for us to show that there is a culture there worth preserving, and these are the people fighting for it."

Obaid-Chinoy remembers worrying if people would show up to the group's first free concert back in Pakistan. They had played sold-out shows in New York City, but could they fill a 1,000-seat auditorium in Lahore?

She took her cameramen outside just five minutes before doors opened. "As far as my eyes could see, there were hundreds and hundreds of people lining up — I mean a sea of people," she says. "That was when I said, 'Well, the musicians have come home.'"

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Got a high-deductible health plan? The kind that doesn't pay most medical bills until they exceed several thousand dollars? You're a foot soldier who's been drafted in the war against high health costs.

Companies that switch workers into high-deductible plans can reap enormous savings, consultants will tell you — and not just by making employees pay more. Total costs paid by everybody — employer, employee and insurance company — tend to fall in the first year or rise more slowly when consumers have more at stake at the health-care checkout counter whether or not they're making medically wise choices.

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Consumers with high deductibles sometimes skip procedures, think harder about getting treatment and shop for lower prices when they do seek care.

What nobody knows is whether such plans, also sold to individuals and families through the health law's online exchanges, will backfire. If people choose not to have important preventive care and end up needing an expensive hospital stay years later as a result, everybody is worse off.

A new study delivers cautiously optimistic results for employers and policymakers, if not for consumers paying a higher share of their own health care costs.

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Researchers led by Amelia Haviland at Carnegie Mellon University found that overall savings at companies introducing high-deductible plans lasted for up to three years afterwards. If there were any cost-related time bombs caused by forgone care, at least they didn't blow up by then.

"Three years out there consistently seems to be a reduction in total health care spending" at employers offering high-deductible plans, Haviland said in an interview. Although the study says nothing about what might happen after that, "this was interesting to us that it persists for this amount of time."

The savings were substantial: 5 percent on average for employers offering high-deductible plans compared with results at companies that didn't offer them. And that was for the whole company, whether or not all workers took the high-deductible option.

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The size of the study was impressive; it covered 13 million employees and dependents at 54 big companies. All savings were from reduced spending on pharmaceuticals and doctor visits and other outpatient care. There was no sign of what often happens when high-risk patients miss preventive care: spikes in emergency-room visits and hospital admissions.

The suits in human resources call this kind of coverage a "consumer-directed" health plan. It sounds less scary than the old name for coverage with huge deductibles: catastrophic health insurance.

But having consumers direct their own care also requires making sure they know enough to make smart choices. That means getting vaccines and skipping dubious procedures like an expensive MRI scan at the first sign of back pain.

"What happens five years or 10 years down the line when people develop more consequences of reducing high-value, necessary care?"

- Amelia Haviland

Not all employers are doing a terrific job. Most high-deductible plan members surveyed in a recent California study had no idea that preventive screenings, office visits and other important care required little or no out-of-pocket payment. One in five said they had avoided preventive care because of the cost.

"This evidence of persistent reductions in spending places even greater importance on developing evidence on how they are achieved," Kate Bundorf, a Stanford health economist not involved in the study, said of consumer-directed plans.

"Are consumers foregoing preventive care?" Bundorf asks. "Are they less adherent to [effective] medicine? Or are they reducing their use of low-value office visits and corresponding drugs or substituting to cheaper yet similarly effective prescribed drugs?"

Employers and consultants are trying to educate people about avoiding needless procedures and finding quality caregivers at better prices.

That might explain why the companies offering high-deductible plans saw such significant savings even though not all workers signed up, Haviland said. Even employees with traditional, lower-deductible plans may be using the shopping tools.

The study doesn't close the book on consumer-directed plans.

"What happens five years or 10 years down the line when people develop more consequences of reducing high-value, necessary care?" Haviland asked. Nobody knows.

And the study doesn't address a side effect of high-deductibles that doctors can't treat: pocketbook trauma. Consumer-directed plans, often paired with tax-favored health savings accounts, can require families to pay $5,000 or more per year in out-of-pocket costs.

Three people out of 5 with low incomes and half of those with moderate incomes told the Commonwealth Fund last year their deductibles are hard to afford.

As in all battles, the front-line infantry often makes the biggest sacrifice.

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Updated at 4:50 p.m. E.T.

For millions of cash-strapped consumers, short-term loans offer the means to cover purchases or pressing needs. But these deals, typically called payday loans, also pack triple-digit interest rates — and critics say that borrowers often end up trapped in a cycle of high-cost debt as a result.

Now, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is preparing to unveil a framework of proposed rules to regulate payday lenders and other costly forms of credit. The federal watchdog agency is showcasing those proposals Thursday, the same day that President Obama spoke in Alabama, defending the agency and its work.

"The idea is pretty common sense: If you lend out money, you have to first make sure that the borrower can afford to pay it back," Obama said. "This is just one more way America's new consumer watchdog is making sure more of your paycheck stays in your pocket."

The new rules would very likely affect consumers like Trudy Robideau, who borrowed money from a payday lender in California to help cover an $800 car repair. When she couldn't repay the money right away, the lender offered to renew the loan for a fee.

"Ka-ching," Robideau said. "You're hooked. You can feel the hook right in your mouth. And you don't know it at the time, but it gets deeper and deeper."

Before long, Robideau was shuttling to other payday lenders, eventually shelling out thousands of dollars in fees.

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"I was having to get one to pay another," she said. "It's a real nightmare."

When Robideau first spoke to NPR back in 2001, payday lending was a $14 billion industry. Since then, it has mushroomed into a $46 billion business. Lenders have also branched into other costly forms of credit, such as loans in which a car title is used as collateral.

"What we want is for that credit to be able to help consumers, not harm them," said Richard Cordray, director of the CFPB. "What we find is that consumers who get trapped in a debt cycle — where they're having to pay again and again, fee after fee — is actually quite detrimental to consumers, and that's what we're concerned about."

Cordray suggests that one solution is to require lenders to make sure borrowers can repay a loan on time, along with their other monthly expenses.

That kind of review was a "bedrock principle" of traditional lending, Cordray said in remarks prepared for a Richmond, Va., field hearing. But many payday lenders "make loans based not on the consumer's ability to repay but on the lender's ability to collect."

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Because payday lenders have automatic access to a borrower's bank account, they can collect even when a borrower is stretched thin.

"If you're behind on existing bills, for any legitimate lender that's a red flag," said Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer advocacy group. "For the payday lenders, that's often a mark of a vulnerable and profitable customer, because they will be stuck."

Payday lenders say they might be willing to live with an ability-to-pay test, so long as it's not too costly or intrusive.

"It only makes sense to lend if you're getting your money back," said Dennis Shaul, CEO of the Community Financial Services Association of America, a payday industry trade group. "Therefore the welfare of the customer is important. Now, so is repeat business."

In fact, repeat borrowers are the heart of the payday business. Government researchers found that 4 out of 5 payday borrowers had to renew their loans, typically before their next paycheck. And 1 in 5 renewed at least seven times, with the accumulated fees often exceeding the amount originally borrowed.

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Regulators are also considering alternatives to the ability-to-pay standard, including limits on the number of loan renewals, as well as mandatory repayment plans. Other proposed rules would crack down on costly collection practices, requiring lenders to notify borrowers three days before taking money out of their bank accounts and limiting the number of withdrawal attempts.

Wynette Pleas of Oakland, Calif., ended up with hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees after a payday lender repeatedly tried to collect from her account.

"They make it seem like it's so convenient, but when you can't pay it back, then that's when all the hell breaks loose," Pleas said.

The proposed regulations are still at an early stage, and there will be plenty of pushback. The industry managed to evade earlier efforts at regulation, so Cordray says that he wants the rules to be free of loopholes.

"We don't want to go through all the effort of formulating rules and then find people are working their way around them," he said.

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