“We’ll prosecute aggressively & put the money back in the pockets of law-abiding Ohioans. The dollar amount will be far greater than most people expect.”
Northeast Columbus is awash in businesses that focus on billing Medicaid for home health aides, with the state paying out about $1 billion for the services in 2024. In a Daily Wire expose, Luke Rosiak revealed that since changes were made to allow family members to provide Medicaid-billable services to the elderly or infirm, "northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaces by businesses that bill Medicaid."
The owners of the vast majority of these companies are foreign living, as Rosiak says, "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." Similarly to when reporters began digging into fraud in Minnesota, Rosiak revealed that when he attempted to discover what was going on with one home health care company, the operator said "I'm just going to tell everybody you guys are racist."
He notes that Columbus has "the second largest Somali population in the country" and has "become, on the surface, the most unhealthy city on the planet." So many people are billing Medicaid for home health care services that it appears that the population is terribly sickly. This mirrors fraud uncovered in Minneapolis, Minnesota that showed the Somali population there experiencing autism at much higher rates—and also government-funded autism provided services not providing services but offering kickpacks to families that signed up their children for non-existent services.
In response to the revelations, Vivek Ramaswamy said "I refuse to tolerate this kind of waste, fraud, & abuse in Medicaid. We'll prosecute aggressively & put the money back in the pockets of law-abiding Ohioans. The dollar amount will be far greater than most people expect."
https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/2051316885137043893?s=20
A home health care operator in Columbus told Rosiak "Well if the government is going to pay you to do it. People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it." Rosiak found an entire building complex dedicated to home health care agencies with nearly no one inside the building. 94 different companies, he said, "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."
The way the business operates is that a Somali immigrant, for example, who helps his mother at home, will sign up with a home health care company. He will become a "home health aide" and bill hours to that company for caring for his mother. The company will bill him out to Medicaid and both the company, and the man will gain income from it. There is no monetary cap, Rosiak notes, and all it requires for approval is "any doctor willing to sign a form saying you could use some help around the house."
Rosiak's expose will continue to run in a few segments, highlighting some of the most egregious examples, including exploitation by politicians, entrepreneurs who rebranded their businesses in order to bilk Medicaid, and landlords able to retire after leasing space to hundreds of fake home health care companies.
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