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:
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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