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DOGE published a massive trove of data in February that, for the first time, lets the public see what companies are billing Medicaid for. For decades, the payouts have been shrouded in secrecy. One of the largest government programs was a black box.
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.
I set my sights on Ohio, which like Minnesota, has been granted waivers to expand Medicaid well beyond its original purpose. Under the guise of health care, 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 health care workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.
According to a Daily Wire data analysis, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home health care in 2024, the last year for which data is available.
Since the services are performed inside private residences, there is no way to know whether the workers went at all, or what they’re actually doing in exchange for taxpayer funds. An infinite number of small black boxes inside a black box. Multiple signs said the service provided, and billed to the government, was sometimes just “companionship & conversation.”
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Driving down Cleveland Avenue, in less than 40 seconds, you come across endless home health companies. Capital Home Health; Continental Home Health; Dynamic Home Healthcare; Ohio Senior Home Healthcare. Entire buildings throughout the city are filled entirely with what appear to be identical businesses.
The enormous complex pictured below is 6161 Busch Boulevard. Its lack of windows would be a problem for most office buildings, but there is almost no one in this one. What’s inside is 94 different companies 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.
This building alone billed taxpayers $66 million in the span of a few years, the records show.
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.
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Sometimes a company will have a full roster of clients in its very first month, making one wonder where the clients come from. The companies don’t have websites or appear to advertise. They can’t stand out from their thousands of rivals based on price, unless they pay kickbacks, because the government pays the same to everyone.
Nearly every owner of home health care companies in Columbus appears to be foreign. They live 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.
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The business model is simple: a 40-year-old Somali immigrant gets paid for spending time with, and maybe cooking for, his own 65-year-old mother. The middleman is one of thousands of “home health” firms that have the “NPI” number necessary to bill Medicaid.
The 40-year-old becomes an “employee” of that company, but has no clients other than his mother. There is no way to verify whether he actually even provided the “services” — unless his own mother is willing to testify against him.
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