There’s no doubt that the fraud revelations that rocked Minnesota in late 2025, and into 2026, marked a mind-blowing scandal.
What do you mean Minnesota’s leadership somehow missed blatant — and costly — fraud happening right under their noses? That’s preposterous!
And yet, if you are a particularly disillusioned cynic, your response to the entire scandal might’ve been, “It’s a deep blue state run by Democrats. What did you expect?”
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.
You don’t need a grand conspiracy to produce abuse in that kind of system. You just need incentives that reward volume over verification and a government apparatus too slow, or too reluctant, to ask hard questions in real time.
And that’s where the political angle starts to matter. It’s easy to frame failures like this as uniquely tied to one party or one kind of state, but the Ohio example complicates that narrative. If similar warning signs are popping up under entirely different leadership, then the problem may be less about ideology and more about a systemic inability — or unwillingness — to enforce accountability when large streams of federal money are involved.
Which raises the bigger question: how many of these “black boxes” exist across the country, quietly operating with minimal scrutiny until someone decides to pull the thread? Because once you accept that this kind of spending can scale into the billions without triggering immediate alarms, it’s hard not to wonder whether Ohio is an outlier or just the latest example.
At a minimum, this is the kind of story that demands urgency, not spin. Whether it ultimately proves to be outright fraud or simply staggering mismanagement, the underlying issue is the same: taxpayer dollars are flowing through a system that doesn’t appear equipped to track them with any real precision.
And if state leadership — Republican or Democrat — can’t get a handle on that, then the scandal isn’t just what’s already happened.
It’s what might still be happening, unnoticed, right now.
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