Officially, I Live in the Death Capital of California

Unofficially, the inordinate number of hospices in the San Fernando Valley are evidence of massive fraud.

As a native of the San Fernando Valley in northwestern Los Angeles, I’ve been writing about health care fraud and Men With Gold Chains for many years. As I wrote in The American Conservative in 2023:

Of the many unexpected developments of the demographic diversification of America, perhaps the oddest has been one so outside our vocabulary that it’s hard to even notice it happening.

It had long seemed inevitable that Los Angeles’ famously white bread suburb, the vast San Fernando Valley, the site of so many Brady Bunch–style sitcoms a half-century ago, would eventually be inundated by Latino immigrants.

But that has slowed. After decades of rapid increase, the Hispanic share of the Valley’s 1.8 million residents only grew from 40 percent to 42 percent from 2010 to 2020. Increasingly, Latinos are losing out in the struggle for the Valley’s expensive turf with immigrants who are officially classified as white.

These newcomers lack any official term with which to conceptually lump them together, but they tend to overlap. I call them the Peoples of the Three Defunct Empires: Persian, Ottoman, and Soviet. In a sour mood, I refer to them as Men with Gold Chains.

Now, CBS has gotten in on the act, or at least the first part of the topic.

Where are these fake hospices?

Paywall here.