A billboard in Columbus / Luke Rosiak
(…) Well, Ohio is decidedly not a deep blue state — let’s call it nominally red or purple, for now — and yet the state and its Republican governor apparently missed some massive red flags that strongly suggested fraud in the Buckeye State.
The Daily Wire did a deep dive investigation into troves of data released by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, showing what companies were billing to Medicaid.
This is how the outlet’s Luke Rosiak put his findings:
“I’ve spent the past two months diving into the numbers. What I found was the most blatant waste of federal dollars that I have encountered in my two decades as an investigative reporter.”
According to The Daily Wire, Ohio spent $1 billion on “home health care” in 2024, which was the last year data was available. This alone was cause for concern for the investigators, as that effectively meant any oversight of these healthcare workers effectively ended when the actual job began in the home.
Rosiak described it as an “infinite number of small black boxes inside a black box,” as far as accountability and oversight went.
Despite that lack of oversight, home health care workers still had to provide something that they could bill for, and the data dump revealed that one such billable service was “companionship and conversation.”
Yes, taxpayer dollars are being spent for family members to… speak to one another. Inside of their home. Or, at least, that’s the worst-case interpretation of it, which is perfectly fair given the lack of details otherwise provided.
Rosiak also noted that, despite the money being spent on very important health services like “conversation,” Columbus still wasn’t getting much healthier — in body or diversity of business practices.
“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,” Rosiak wrote. “And Columbus, a city with the second largest Somali population in the country, has become, on the surface, the most unhealthy city on the planet.”
(Yes, if you’re the sort to notice patterns, the Minnesota fraud scandal was strongly linked to the Somali community there, as well.)
Rosiak further pointed out that 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.”
Perhaps the most alarming finding of these red flags for fraud is the scope of it all.
“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.”
This piece is part of a larger series, and Rosiak promised that future installments would shed more light on this potential fraud, including:
- “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 million-dollar Medicaid business owned by a couple with repeated fraud, violence, and theft convictions.”
And so on, and so forth.
Look, obviously, it’s too early to outright call this “fraud.” But if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s certainly no mongoose. At the very least, it’s a scandal, and the sort that the Republican leadership in Ohio would be best served to address, and quickly.
What makes this especially unsettling is how familiar it all feels. A massive pool of public money, a loosely defined service, and just enough bureaucratic distance to make real oversight difficult. (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 5/6/2026) (Archive)