Medicaid Fraud comes in many guises

"Zip codes" pop up in Ohio's breaking story, along with other similar features.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/05/08/mehek-cooke-massive-health-care-fraud-ignored-as-billions-drained-from-ohio-taxpayers/

Massive Health Care Fraud Ignored as Billions Drained From Ohio Taxpayers

Daily Signal Staff    |    May 8, 2026

Mehek Cooke, senior national security and legal analyst at The Daily Signal, warned that the growing fraud scandal in Ohio is not an isolated case but part of a systemic failure across welfare programs nationwide.

Appearing on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” Thursday, Cooke said she discovered widespread health care fraud last December that is allegedly draining billions in taxpayer dollars. She brought this evidence to government officials, but many failed to take it seriously.

“This was the tip of the spear,” Cooke said of Ohio, pointing to similar fraud cases in other states. “Any time you have a welfare program, there’s going to be fraud because government is so complacent.”

Cooke described her firsthand efforts to investigate suspicious activity in Ohio’s home health care system, including making door-to-door inquiries in areas receiving significant taxpayer funding in Franklin County. Several whistleblowers alerted Cooke in December to alleged home health care fraud in Ohio, claiming that patients were entering doctors’ offices, claiming they needed home health care services. Upon evaluation, providers determined that they did not qualify for those services, but some of these individuals then threatened that if the paperwork was not rubber-stamped, they would return to providers who would approve it.

After receiving this information, Cooke said she brought the alleged fraud to the Ohio attorney general’s office and the Department of Medicaid.

Cooke also visited close to 100 home health care offices. What she found raised serious concerns about whether services were being legitimately provided.

“So, when you knock on doors, most of these people are in the Somalian community. They don’t speak English, so I’m wondering how they’re even providing services,” Cooke said. “It’s hidden behind closed doors.”

Cooke pointed to the concentration of funds in specific areas as a major red flag. Ohio has spent approximately $1 billion to $1.6 billion on home health care, she noted. Franklin County alone accounts for 38% of that spending, and within the county, roughly 40% is disproportionately concentrated in just two ZIP codes, amounting to about $243 million, based on statistics from Ohio Auditor Keith Faber.

“At some point, the state has to ask, what’s going on in these two ZIP codes?” she said. “But they didn’t. Our governor came out and said it’s the cost of doing business.”

Cooke criticized state leadership for failing to provide transparency, saying key agencies have not released basic funding data despite repeated public records requests.

She said the lack of enforcement is not due to a lack of authority but a lack of political will. “Prosecutors need evidence of fraud, and that responsibility starts with the governor’s office and the attorney general’s office,” Cooke said. “But if leadership won’t provide the information, cases can’t move forward.”

Cooke highlighted Faber as one of the few officials actively investigating potential fraud, but she warned that audits take significant time.

“People are complacent in the state of Ohio and in so many of these agencies,” Cooke added. “It’s not their tax dollars. It’s ours. They don’t care about Ohioans. They don’t care about Americans. They just want to keep funneling money out the door as long as they get paid.”

Without immediate accountability, Cooke warned, taxpayers will continue to fund a system vulnerable to exploitation.

Ohio Governor Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Reveals 288 Companies At One Single Address Are Billing Medicaid!

Ohio is home to the second-largest Somali community in the United States, after fraud-wracked Minnesota.  An estimated 70,000 Somali residents are concentrated in Columbus, which just happens to be the state capitol!

https://nypost.com/2026/05/10/us-news/ohio-gov-candidate-vivek-ramaswamy-sounds-alarm-about-medicaid-fraud-after-288-companies-found-registered-to-same-address/

Ohio gov candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sounds alarm about Medicaid fraud — after 288 companies found registered to same address
By Chris Nesi - May 10, 2026

Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy is calling for a major crackdown on Medicaid fraud in the state after a probe allegedly uncovered millions of dollars in taxpayer funds being funneled to nonexistent home-healthcare companies.

The investigation found 288 separate Ohio home-healthcare companies with the same address — while listed locations for some of the supposed businesses appeared run-down or abandoned with no evidence any services were actually being provided.

“We’re going to have to take a deep, hard look at the way the $40-plus billion in state Medicaid dollars are being spent,” Ramaswamy told Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany during an appearance on “Saturday in America.”

“I think the right answer is any instance of waste, fraud, abuse … deserve[s] to be prosecuted, and we intend to investigate them aggressively, as well as to prosecute aggressively, to send a deterrent signal that our government is not a piggy bank, the taxpayer is not a piggy bank to be bilked,” he said.

The billionaire Republican candidate sounded the alarm after the recent Daily Wire report alleging widespread fraud reminiscent of what investigators found at dozens of purported childcare businesses operating in Minneapolis in recent months.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s office fired back at Ramaswamy’s suggestion that social-services fraud is happening unchecked in the state.

In a statement to Fox News, DeWine’s office claimed Ohio has “extensive oversight mechanisms in place,” including “electronic visit verification for hourly care, requiring signed daily activity logs, conducting audits and surveys performing background checks on providers, and reassessing medical needs regularly.”

The term-limited governor’s office cited additional existing measures to root out would-be scammers, including “internal agency efforts to fight waste, fraud and abuse.”

In a statement to the outlet, the Ohio Department of Medicaid acknowledged the concerns the article raised, particularly in Franklin County, and said it has been “actively investigating these matters” even before the report was published.

“Upon initial review, some of the entities mentioned in the series are no longer Ohio Medicaid providers or have not billed Medicaid in several years. Some other providers are subject to ongoing investigation,” the statement said.

Ramaswamy chalked up the alleged rampant fraud as “downstream policies” of open borders and an “overgrown federal welfare state.

“That’s a big problem,” he said.

“We can’t fix the past. We can fix the future, and one of the things that I intend to do is to just take a dispassionate look at this,” he said.

“It’s not just responding to one news story or another as a game of whack-a-mole. The way I look at this is this is more of a broken-windows theory, which means that, if you have a broken window somewhere, it’s a reminder that we have to take a systematic look at the whole thing.”

Speaking of Medicaid fraud in Ohio, a profound money shot:

One big problem with Medicaid is that, because of the way it’s financed, fraud actually pays dividends to the states, which get federal matching dollars for every dollar spent on providing Medicaid benefits. So, if the state doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to phony day care, hospice, or “home health” companies, Washington kicks in hundreds of millions, which the state can then use to pay for legitimate healthcare.

https://issuesinsights.com/2026/05/08/which-state-is-next-in-the-medicaid-fraud-o-rama/

https://www.dailywire.com/news/medicaid-millionaires-how-the-feds-pay-immigrants-billions-to-hang-out-with-their-families

Which State Is Next In The Medicaid Fraud-O-Rama?
By I & I Editorial Board - May 8, 2026

When the scale of the Medicaid fraud in Minnesota started to emerge, our first thought was that, if it’s that easy to rip off Medicaid, the North Star State can’t be the only place where it’s happening.

Turns out we were right, as the Daily Wire’s exposé of massive fraud schemes in Ohio makes clear. Which means there are almost certainly still more to be uncovered. Which leads to the question of why we are learning about this only now.

Daily Wire is releasing a five-part series that alleges massive fraud in an Ohio Medicaid program – a state that obtained a waiver so it could reimburse “home healthcare.” The idea made sense. Care at home is cheaper than in skilled nursing facilities.

But it threw open the door to flagrant abuse.

As the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak explains, “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 healthcare workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.”

Rosiak dug into a treasure trove of Medicaid data released by DOGE and found the same thing being uncovered by independent journalists in Minnesota and in California. Obvious cases of fraud. Storefronts that don’t appear to be doing anything other than billing Medicaid. And, as it turns out, lots of immigrants are running these scams.

In the second part of his series, he reports finding 288 “home health” companies in just seven buildings in Columbus, Ohio, that collectively billed Medicaid $250 million.

So now, independent, muckraking journalists have uncovered massive child care fraud schemes in Minnesota, hospice fraud schemes in California, and a bustling “home health” care racket in Ohio.

And in each case, the governors have dismissed the allegations, claiming that their administration is aggressively rooting out fraud and that this is all just MAGA types causing trouble.

Even Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s initial statement – after the Daily Wire’s first article in the series was published – was dismissive of the report, saying that it “does not seem to allege any fraud in the details provided.”

One big problem with Medicaid is that, because of the way it’s financed, fraud actually pays dividends to the states, which get federal matching dollars for every dollar spent on providing Medicaid benefits. So, if the state doles out hundreds of millions of dollars to phony day care, hospice, or “home health” companies, Washington kicks in hundreds of millions, which the state can then use to pay for legitimate healthcare.

So, how many more Medicaid schemes are out there? How many schemes involve food stamps? Obamacare? Medicare?

If the journalism profession weren’t so hopelessly captured by the Democratic Party, every investigative journalist at every major news outlet in every state would be digging into to see if it’s happening in their hometowns.

But our guess is that zero are, because it would be seen as somehow helping Donald Trump.

Instead, reporters are filing stories about the “devastating,” “draconian,” and “deadly” Medicaid cuts Republicans approved as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Typical is an NPR headline from last week: “It’s Day 1 of Medicaid work requirements in Nebraska. People are worried.” The Bulwark, which is so insanely anti-Trump that it now makes the Huffington Post look sensible, cried that “Trump’s Big Medicaid Cuts Are About to Get Very Real.”

You’d think Democrats would be as adamant as anyone about rooting out fraud. After all, every dollar that goes to a con artist is a dollar that isn’t being used to help the needy.

But as we’ve said before, for today’s Democrats, fraud isn’t a bug that needs to be stamped out. It’s a feature that enriches their friends and family — and gets them reelected.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board