The patient was a young black man named James Cornish. He had been rushed to Provident Hospital on the South Side with a knife wound in his chest from a barroom brawl. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams--a founder of Provident, which had opened two years previously as the city's first interracial hospital--knew Cornish was bleeding to death.
Sometimes its your bank that allows charges to go through on an expired card if they determine it to be a recurring service charge. This is why it's often not sufficient to request a new card number if you are trying to stop a company from continuing to charge you for a recurring service.
Then you look down at the card and realize, with a mixture of relief and annoyance: Oh, this card expired yesterday. The short answer: Fraud prevention. The major networks (Visa and MasterCard) mandate that issuers (your bank or credit union, for example) put expiration dates on credit and debit cards. They're meant to serve as one more data point that needs to get verified before a charge goes through.