I & I Editorial BoardWhen 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.”
See Also:
Just How Easy Is It To Rip Off The Federal Gov’t?
For Today’s Democrats, Fraud Is A Feature, Not A Bug
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
It’s being reported that some of these state legislators, whose state fraud is being exposed, are considering laws to criminalize anyone who would uncover the truth and the deceit. Efforts such as this are beyond the pale and seriously jeopardize the entire system of our government.
The last paragraph hits the nail on the head. The Democrats no longer see levels of taxation and government spending as a gauge of how much the government is doing to help people, but how adequately the government is propping up their kickback/NGO/sinecure-producing patronage schemes to their would be political allies. They see securing enough of other people’s money as a good in and of itself as a means of redistributing income from anyone they can take it from, to the benefit of their benefactors who only incidentally are ever everyday citizens. They no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt that they care about the well-being of anybody or anything except their own corrupt, ill-gotten, cancerous political machine.
It’s just occurred to me, but both my wife and I have received a dozen or more calls for “in home health checks”. Are these part of that type of fraud???
Same here – but they’re trying to “go through the motions” of providing some kind of actual service (but they’re not.) Many of these exposed scams are total fabrications, with fictional patients, locations and services rendered. The common thread has been the democrat party and their NGOs.
That is a different fraud program. If you have Medicare part C, your insurer sends an “in home health check” worker, who may or may not be a medical professional to verify whether you have any as-yet unidentified health issues, so they can upgrade their reimbursements from Medicare. So, if you use a walker at times, or have Diabetes [even if not insulin dependent,] or seem to have some forgetfulness, they can upgrade you to a higher medically compromised level and get additional federal payments because they are treating more medically compromised patients than the average Medicaid participant. Note, they do not perform more care or notify your primary care physician that he needs to do more tests or provide more care. It just means the insurer gets a higher reimbursement rate any time you access services.
NONE of them will gace the music, so its a moot point.
I’m a Ohio resident and have voted for Republican DeWine before. The DeWine of his 2nd Governor term wasn’t the same DeWine of the 1st term-or, especially, the younger firebrand DeWine who previously ran for attorney-General.
Governor DeWine’s legacy now appears to be like a worn carpet that has been tread on for too many years. In his case he seems to have if not profited by fraud encouraged it by not doing anything about it.
I suppose in legal terms DeWine’s nonchalant attitude would be called “abetting fraud” rather than what it really was: A tired old man who let COVID and politics get the better of him.
It is unfortunate that Vivek Ramaswamy’s-the newly elected Republican candidate for Governor-campaign can’t help but be infected by DeWine’s lackadaisical attempt to ferret out fraud in the Medicaid scams.
I’m voting for the Cincinnatian Ramaswamy because he sounds like he has the fire-and he certainly has the intellect-to get rid of the corruption that DeWine has allowed to bloom.
Ramaswamy was in Doge for a time; he has the endorsement of President Trump and, as I said, he has my vote. He has promised to sweep away all this political and windswept corruption in Ohio and prosecute all the fraudsters and scam artists to the full extent of the law. I just hope to God he doesn’t fool me as Mike DeWine did!
more conservative BS! thanks for your over-biased opinion.