Care to Cash: Investigative Report Exposes Ohio Medicaid ‘Homemaking’ Boom
“The business model is simple: a 40-year-old Somali immigrant gets paid for spending time with, and maybe cooking for, his own 65-year-old mother.”
Before ceasing operations in February, the Department of Government Efficiency published comprehensive data detailing exactly how Medicaid dollars were spent. Over the past two months, The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak — a veteran investigative reporter who has spent two decades exposing federal waste and fraud — has combed through the numbers and says they reveal the biggest scandal he’s ever uncovered.
In the first installment of a multi-part series titled “Medicaid Millionaires,” published on Monday, he details how billions of dollars were spent on “personal services” — including, in some cases, payments to family members for providing companionship and conversation to their own relatives.
Rosiak focused first on Columbus, Ohio, a city with the second-largest Somali population in the country. He reported:
Under the guise of health care, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid beneficiaries’ homes to perform “homemaking” and “chores” like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these “personal services” tasks don’t even have to be health care workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.
According to a Daily Wire data analysis, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home health care in 2024, the last year for which data is available.
Since the services are performed inside private residences, there is no way to know whether the workers went at all, or what they’re actually doing in exchange for taxpayer funds. … Multiple signs said the service provided, and billed to the government, was sometimes just “companionship & conversation.”
As people have realized the United States government will pay them to hang out with their own families, northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaced by businesses that bill Medicaid.
One home health care operator told him, “Well if the government is going to pay you to do it. … People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.”
Apparently, many small companies are making millions by exploiting these types of services. Rosiak described seeing entire buildings in Columbus filled with home health companies. “Driving down Cleveland Avenue, in less than 40 seconds, you come across endless home health companies. Capital Home Health; Continental Home Health; Dynamic Home Healthcare; Ohio Senior Home Healthcare.”
One enormous complex (with almost no one inside) contained “94 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in “Home Health LLC” — and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break.”
He noted, that businesses in “this building alone billed taxpayers $66 million in the span of a few years.”
Rosiak challenged his readers to “pick the owner of a Columbus home health care company at random and look him up in public records, and you are likely to go down an endless rabbit hole: years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, and an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they make from Medicaid are just a side gig.”
Among the dubious discoveries he has turned up over the past couple of months:
- A politician who founded an $11 million home health care company that he appeared to run part-time — without even mentioning it in his political biography — who funded his campaign with donations from other home health care owners.
- A woman who reinvented her janitorial LLC as a “health” provider, then billed Medicaid nearly $100,000 the first month.
- A landlord who bought airplanes after renting space to hundreds of home health care companies that billed Medicaid a quarter of a billion dollars.
- A million-dollar Medicaid business owned by a couple with repeated fraud, violence, and theft convictions.
To no one’s surprise, Roziak found that “nearly every owner of home health care companies in Columbus appears to be foreign. They live in a parallel society, where every associate in public records also has a foreign name, and all their business transactions are conducted with other foreigners.”
Additionally, Roziak alleges that many home health care operators in Columbus lack medical expertise and have become wealthy through Medicaid-funded caregiving businesses despite limited success elsewhere.
According to the report, the business model often involves family members being paid through Medicaid-funded agencies to care for relatives, with limited oversight and few practical ways to verify whether services were actually provided.
He claims that some companies rapidly acquire full client rosters without visible advertising and operate within tightly connected immigrant communities.
He provided some details:
When we asked one what home health care companies did, one man threatened: “Journalists? Who cares? Do you guys pay my bills? I’m going to tell everybody you guys are racist.”
The government cannot be meaningfully monitoring all the people it writes million-dollar checks to in Columbus. They all share combinations of just a few names, like Ahmed Mohamed and Mohamed Ahmed. Documents reviewed by The Daily Wire show individuals will spell their own name multiple different ways within a single document. And many of them list their birthday as January 1, because their birthdates are unknown.
The business model is simple: a 40-year-old Somali immigrant gets paid for spending time with, and maybe cooking for, his own 65-year-old mother. The middleman is one of thousands of “home health” firms that have the “NPI” number necessary to bill Medicaid.
The 40-year-old becomes an “employee” of that company, but has no clients other than his mother. There is no way to verify whether he actually even provided the “services” — unless his own mother is willing to testify against him.
The Trump administration has already begun scrutinizing alleged fraud schemes in both Minnesota and California. But Rosiak’s reporting on fraud in a third state suggests that the manipulation of the system — and the corruption enabling it — may be far more widespread and deeply entrenched than previously understood.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn.
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Comments
The rot spreads deeper than the immigrant community.
My own health insurance company (Healthspring, formerly Cigna) has been pressuring me to participate in its program where nurses and such travel to my home to cater to me on a regular basis. Now this behavior might be excusable… were they not THE organization with access to every one of my health records, and therefore well aware that I’m a reasonably perfectly healthy septuagenarian who drives, walks, runs two small businesses, and wrangles livestock — all without the aid of senior vans, wheelchairs, dialysis, seeing-eye dogs, or even meals on wheels.
My reaction up until now has been, “what the hell are you people thinking?” Now, I suspect I understand it much better.
Aetna Medicare does this too.
Now you’ve got me wondering.
this is nothing
check out east cleveland
you want to see how tribalism is working in the usa?
they might be worse than omarville mn
“Before ceasing operations in February, the Department of Government Efficiency published comprehensive data detailing exactly how Medicaid dollars were spent.”
Thanks, Elon!
We don’t have the necessary level of trust to allow govt programs to be established/maintained with what is essentially self regulation. Maybe that could have worked in the nostalgic era of 1950s but I doubt it. Too much easy money sloshing around with zero oversight or accountability. Too much weaponized empathy, feelings over facts and far too much virtue signaling v genuine virtue being displayed. Every attempt to get some sunlight and transparency to introduce meaningful controls and swift/serious consequences for those who seek to defraud/scam the system and especially towards those officials who turned a blind eye will be met with fury from an overly indulged, entitled set of grifters and their surrogates.
“Maybe that could have worked in the nostalgic era of 1950s but I doubt it.”
Nah, it wouldn’t have worked out then, either.
Look at it this way: today’s Mafia problem doesn’t speak Italian.
Absent financial abuse, it can be cheaper, and better for the patient, to pay a relative to do domestic services. I know of an unambitious wastrel son who would be crashing on a friend’s coach, smoking dope and playing video games absent this program. Instead, he lives with his early onset Alzheimer’s mother, taking her to medical appointments and helping her dress, bathe etc. She feels the love of a son and he gets an easy gig that allows him to still laze around most of the day. Not a bad thing, all considered.
I know of a woman who has an “unambitious wastrel son” who gets paid to care for her. He does show up once in a while to fix her a meal.
I’m so old, I remember when such a thing was considered a family duty, and nobody got paid by the government to do it.
Who decided to obligate me and all taxpayers to pay that lazy guy to take care of his own parent?
The point is if he isn’t paid, the woman will not go without help. That help will cost you a hell of a lot more in tax dollars.
not if the correct pressure is put on the wealth dem donors to take care of “their” people
We have a scam just like this here in New York. I expect it’s normal in Democrat run states.
My favorite radio station out of Philadelphia runs ads for how you can get paid to care for your loved ones.
Well, Ohio is a Red state. This is not limited to Blue states. I really wish DOGE had gotten more involved with uncovering the fraud, waste and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. I saw so much Medicare waste and abuse, if not outright fraud, in my years working in nursing and rehabilitation facilities. It was simply standard operating procedure. No oversight.
Maybe I missed it above. Has anything actually been done about the “One enormous complex (with almost no one inside) [that] contained ‘94 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in ‘Home Health LLC’ — and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break.’ “? Any investigations, indictments? How about someone just turning off the money spigot?
“Has anything actually been done about the “One enormous complex”
Yeah, they filed a protective order against Nick Shirley.
Home health care was a “thing” back in the 80s when I worked for a visiting nurse outfit in Providence, RI. The home health care “aides” weren’t professionals, but they were employed by a business that was largely staffed and run by RNs (actual medical professionals). I worked in the field with both nurses and HHCAs, and never saw nary a hint that anything shady was about.
That’s fine when the caregivers are arm’s-length contractors, and not people that the “patient” has an ulterior motive to enrich.
Now do Maine where Dem senate hopeful Herr Platner is busy courting the Somali squatters in Lewiston. They have been a problem for a long time.
Which government employees are approving all these NPI numbers, we need to know. Start with them, make them explain how they vetted these cheaters. Then fire them. And go after their supervisors, fire them. Then shut down the agency.
I think the entire government operates that way. . While private business would demand accountability for money spent, government employees can give it out freely without any oversight or follow-up.
This one scares me as there are REAL legitimate times families do need paid caregiver support funding. I am forced to stay home with no income to care for my 32 year old daughter with schizophrenia because the state refuses to put her in a higher level of care. She assaults me, busts up my home, and refuses sometimes to go to her half day mental health program. It’s not fair to me at 55 to have been forced into this since 2020 because the state refuses to do it’s job. I should be getting paid to do this work as I lost five years of work and now if I become disabled I am no longer at SSDI level pay because I lost working quarters. It also means no retirement as I had to cash out what I had to save me from losing my house. Yet I see perfect healthy people getting these supports around Central NY as a form of employment for food stamps. That’s what genius Onondaga County NY came up with as a solution for the work requirements! Thank the RINO county leader we have. They denied my senior mom any of these services before she died and also my daughter. Both were or are high level needs with round the clock care needs.
your situation sounds bad but again as your own post shows
counting on waiting on the government is futile and if all the truly hurt people got together like those healthy ones you described and marched on the politicians offices and demanded that any and all monetary contributions to them can be made in their name but given to the people who need it its a win win
its our acceptance of waiting on the government that has brought us here
time for you to “unionize” and get done as I have described
stop the programs completely
give people their own money back
hey obama gave iran their money back ( trump might do the same)
then pressure the wealthy to not give to the politician but to the people that need the help and only elect pols who abide by that rule
This is rapidly morphing into a major new entitlement program. Apparently the only qualification to receive care is being old or “infirm” in some manner, and the only requirement to be paid is a claim that services are being provided. Therefore every elderly person now has the right to have a relative or friend paid to take care of them, The scammers take care of the paperwork in exchange for a cut for “administrative services”, so they will be out there marketing access to the free money machine endlessly. Sadly, this is eventually going to screw things up for those legitimately in need of care, but that’s just Socialism in action.
Come to think of it, there seems to be a real opportunity here for any couple to get paid twice by claiming they both are disabled and take care of each other. I treat many elderly people who would jump at the chance to enhance their bottom line, so the scammers won’t really need that much marketing once the word gets out about this.