Vivek Ramaswamy just went on national television and promised a "ruthless" cleanout of Ohio's Medicaid program after a Daily Wire investigation revealed that nearly 300 home healthcare companies were registered at the same handful of addresses — many of them vacant or abandoned buildings. No doctors. No patients. No services. Just invoices, cashed checks, and a state government that apparently couldn't be bothered to notice.
Let that sink in. Nearly 300 companies. Same addresses. Empty offices. And somehow, $40 billion-plus in annual Ohio Medicaid spending just kept flowing like a busted fire hydrant in July.
Appearing on Kayleigh McEnany's "Saturday in America," Ramaswamy didn't mince words about what he'd do as Ohio's next governor. "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," he said, calling the fraud something that "deserves to be prosecuted."
He's not wrong. This isn't a rounding error. This isn't bureaucratic inefficiency. This is industrial-scale theft from taxpayers, and the people running these phantom companies knew exactly what they were doing.
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Ramaswamy went further, calling out the broader rot. "Our government is not a piggy bank, the taxpayer is not a piggy bank to be bilked," he told McEnany. And then he connected the dots that the legacy media always conveniently forgets — these scams don't exist in a vacuum. They're "downstream policies of an overgrown federal welfare state" that's become so bloated, so sprawling, that nobody's watching the register.
He also tied the fraud directly to the border crisis, noting that the schemes are downstream "of an open border crisis under Joe Biden where for years millions and millions of people were crossing the southern border." When you combine a Medicaid system designed to ask zero questions with an immigration system designed to let everyone in, you get exactly what Ohio got — a $40 billion honey pot with no lock on the door.
Current Governor Mike DeWine has presided over this entire mess. The Ohio Department of Medicaid apparently had the oversight capacity of a sleeping mall cop. Nearly 300 companies billing from ghost offices, and nobody in Columbus thought to maybe drive by one of these addresses and check if the lights were on?
This is the kind of government waste that makes your blood boil — not because the fraud is surprising, but because it was so laughably easy. These weren't criminal masterminds. They registered companies at abandoned buildings. They didn't even try to hide it. And the state just kept writing checks.
Ramaswamy is bringing DOGE energy to the governor's mansion, and frankly, Ohio needs it. The Daily Wire investigation blew the lid off what insiders probably knew for years — that Ohio's Medicaid system was a buffet line for fraudsters, and the bouncers had all gone home.
Every single one of these phantom operations needs to be investigated, every operator needs to face prosecution, and every dollar that can be clawed back needs to come home to the taxpayers who earned it. Vivek promised ruthless. Ohio's about to find out what that looks like.