00:00
All right, let's go to the WRD talk line. We'll talk to John and Marietta. How you doing, John?
00:08
doing well, sir. I'm not a first time caller, but can I still get the bell? I'll give you the bell. You want the bell. You want the bell. You get the bell, John. Yes, absolutely. What's up? Hey, so have you ever been to Los Angeles? No, I've not. OK, well, there's a place called La Brea. Yeah, right. You heard the La Brea tar pit. Yeah. You know what that is? Is it oil? What is it? I have no idea. It's it's bubbling up.
00:38
in london
01:02
out of the ground and they won't do anything with it. is the dangest thing you will ever see in your life. Well that's because they found some dinosaur bones in it.
01:12
Well, I don't do okay, good. I know, right? I'm kind of the same way. Okay, big deal. But grind, grind, grind them up and make a gallon of gas out of it. You're exactly right. I agree. John, you deserve that bill today. I appreciate it, buddy. But I'm looking at all of these all of these refineries and good. I thought. We got the closest one to us. Is actually I had no idea.
01:41
It is down in, I know y'all don't know anything about Pula, Georgia, but it's kind of near Pula. um Kind of you go down past Hilton Head, past Defuski, kind of east of Tybee Island, there's actually a, it's called the Coastal Refining Corporation. um They've got one there. Where's another one? That is really, that's the closest one to us.
02:11
Actually, we've got what is this? Oh never mind. That's something else um Let's see Got one down in Clearwater, Florida Then you go over to Louisiana How is that? Yeah, Louisiana, then you get into to the Texas area. You got some over there looking out on the West Coast We've got what I got. I just got a couple It's got it. I mean you would think the West Coast. Well, of course the West Coast
02:42
they're not going to be doing refining, right? They got to have all their greenie weenie ideologies going on there. So anyway, there you go. All well, you just heard top of the hour uh with Stacey Bartrow about the medical fraud accusations that were levied on a business up here in the upstate. Anytime you have a federal program, this is the weirdest thing, but it's not. It's not weird, it's weird, but it's not.
03:12
Every federal program is rife with fraud. Every single one of them. I don't care what it is. Somebody is out there trying to game the system. We saw that in Minnesota. We saw that with the Somali community.
03:34
um with their autism fraud and their home health care fraud and their learning center fraud. We got fraud up in North Carolina. Now we got fraud here in South Carolina.
03:48
I was shocked when I found out, listen to this, this is gonna blow your mind. 30%, 30 % of all of the hospice and home healthcare companies in the United States, 30 % of them are in LA County.
04:10
30%. So they were like, hey, wait a minute, hold on. Let's kind of find out what's going on here. And a lot is going on.
04:21
18 % of the entire country's home health care billing is coming out of Los Angeles. One doctor billed the government $120 million in a single year claiming to oversee 1,900 patients.
04:38
Los Angeles County has over 2000 hospice agencies. That's more than 36 states combined. And now finally it is so big that the mainstream media they're having to pay attention to it. 69 year old Doctor Lynn Ioni was according to Medicare records dying in hospice care two years ago, something she discovered when she sought physical therapy for a pickleball injury. And I said what? What are you talking about?
05:08
Ioni's Medicare number had been stolen and used by a company to enroll her in hospice care, which she obviously didn't need. Just to think you were literally without coverage because of some ridiculous fraudulent thing. A CBS News investigation found an industry ripe for fraud, especially in California. Companies accused of over billing. Real patients denied care.
05:32
and it's costing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. When we called the hospice at fraudulently enrolled IONI, no one answered. uh CBS News analyzed every hospice licensed in LA County, more than 1,700, and checked for the same warning signs the state used in an audit of the industry, like multiple hospices packed into one building, or caregivers whose patients, supposedly at death's door, are discharged alive.
05:57
You can't throw a rock without hitting a hospice. brought our. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and she's absolutely right. One building. In Los Angeles, one building had 67 hospice agencies in it. 67.
06:15
But I'm gonna tell you the...
06:18
the bigger the organization.
06:22
the easier they are to defraud.
06:27
And that's just a fact. That's just a fact. In fact, wasn't it Lawrence County where they got defrauded here recently? I think it was.
06:43
um Yeah, Lawrence County is suing, they filed a lawsuit claiming that it was scammed out of more than a million dollars by cyber criminals who pretended to be their contractor, Mashburn Construction Company. The lawsuit claims that the county was tricked into sending money through a new bank account set up by the criminals. And they tell us not to give out any information, right? Don't give out any personal information online.
07:12
Hey, yeah, yeah, this is Mashburn. How you doing? Yeah, we got a new bank account. If you wouldn't mind, just kind of pay us with that bank account. Okey-dokey.
07:22
I'm pretty sure I was a little more involved than that, but...
07:27
fraud is everywhere.
07:30
The lawsuit states that the county was tricked into sending money through a new bank account set up by the criminals. The county is seeking to recover the lost funds and has requested that the court freeze the fraudulent bank account among other actions. I bet they did. I'll bet they did. When we get back, well, let's go to Justin in Silva and talk to him. Justin, welcome. And by the way, I got it right this time. Yes, you did. I got it right this time. Would I actually, all that fraud sounds pretty...
07:59
pretty awful, you know, to that extent that there's that much fraud going on. Yeah. What I actually wanted to talk about is ah I don't know why more people on the right aren't uh talking about electric cars nowadays uh because they've in the past 10, 15 years, electric cars have gotten, you know, so improved. And yet we're still, you know, we're still clean to oil and gas, even under
08:28
Donald Trump, very oil and gas friendly president, bombs drop on the other side of the world and prices jump 50 cents a gallon. We'd be way better off as far as energy security is concerned if we embraced more electricity because we uh can produce basically 100 % of our need domestically without needing to import so much from...
08:55
But here's the thing. Here's the thing about that. We don't have the electric grid to handle that.
09:04
We just don't have the electric end. mean, hell, we can hardly keep up with the amount of people that are moving here to Greenville to meet their electricity demands. And then we've got the data centers and all of that. I'm telling you what, that needs to be a big, big um thing that needs to be improved in this country is handling our electric grid, because it's in bad shape. Justin, I appreciate it. Got to hit a break here. It's the Charlie James Show.
09:33
Newstalk 989 W O R D. voice of the Carolinas.
Mar 11, 2026
