Imagine getting paid — by the government, with taxpayer money — to visit your own mother. Not to perform surgery on her. Not to administer medication. Not to provide any skilled care whatsoever. Just to be there. In the same room. Existing in her general proximity.
Now imagine billing six figures for it annually. Welcome to Ohio’s Medicaid program, where the scam is so brazen it almost deserves respect. Almost.
Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak spent two months digging into how Somali immigrants in Ohio are billing Medicaid over ONE BILLION DOLLARS annually for something called “personal services.” And what are these personal services, you ask? Companionship. Literally just spending time with people — often their own family members — through shell companies they set up specifically to collect taxpayer checks.
Here’s how the grift works, and it’s so simple that a child could design it — which is concerning because children might actually be billing for it too. You set up a company. You register it as a “personal services” provider under Ohio Medicaid. You list your family members as clients who need “companionship” services. Then you bill the state for spending time with them. There are no monetary caps. There is zero verification. Nobody checks. Nobody audits. Nobody asks whether Grandma actually needed a state-funded visitor or whether she just has a grandson who figured out the cheat code.
The system isn’t broken. That’s what people keep missing. The system is working EXACTLY as it was designed to work — which is to say, it was designed by people who either didn’t care about fraud or actively wanted it to happen.
Think about this for one second from a common-sense perspective. You work forty, fifty, sixty hours a week. Taxes come out of every paycheck — federal, state, Medicare, Medicaid. You watch those deductions and you think, well, at least it’s going to help people who genuinely need it. People in nursing homes. Disabled veterans. Kids with serious medical conditions.
Nope. It’s going to a guy whose “job” is visiting his own relative. A job that every normal family in America does for FREE because that’s what families DO.
The numbers are staggering. Over a billion dollars. Annually. In ONE state. That’s not a rounding error. That’s not a few bad actors slipping through the cracks. That’s an industry. That’s an entire economic model built on the assumption that American taxpayers are too busy, too distracted, or too beaten down to notice.
And here’s the part that should make your blood pressure spike: there are no caps. None. You can bill unlimited amounts for unlimited hours of “companionship.” So while you’re sitting in traffic at 6 AM heading to a job that barely covers your mortgage, someone in Ohio is billing the state $50 an hour to sit on their aunt’s couch and watch daytime television. And there’s no maximum. They can bill for 24 hours a day if they want to, and apparently some of them do.
The shell companies are the cherry on top. These aren’t sophisticated corporate structures. They’re paper entities created for the sole purpose of converting family visits into Medicaid claims. Set one up, list yourself as the provider, list your relative as the client, and start invoicing. The state sends checks. It’s that simple. It’s BEEN that simple. For years.
Now, before someone accuses me of being anti-immigrant — I’m anti-fraud. I don’t care who’s committing it. If a third-generation American in Akron was pulling this exact same scam, I’d be just as furious. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: this particular fraud pattern was built within a specific community that figured out a specific vulnerability in a specific system, and it scaled because nobody in a position of authority had the guts to flag it for fear of being called names.
That’s the real disease. Not the fraud itself — the cowardice that lets it metastasize. The bureaucrats who saw the billing patterns and looked away. The administrators who noticed the shell companies and did nothing. The politicians who could’ve capped the program or required verification and chose not to. Every single one of them decided that protecting your tax dollars was less important than avoiding an uncomfortable headline.
A billion dollars. In Ohio alone. While American families skip dental appointments because their deductibles are too high. While veterans wait months for VA care. While your local hospital closes its ER because Medicaid reimbursement rates are too low to keep the lights on.
But sure. Let’s keep funding unlimited, unverified companionship visits between family members. Let’s keep writing blank checks to shell companies that exist on paper and nowhere else. Let’s keep pretending this is a compassionate system rather than a looting operation.
You’re the one working for it. You’re the one it’s being stolen from. And until last week, nobody with a platform was even willing to say it out loud.
Luke Rosiak said it. The Daily Wire printed it. Now you know. The question is whether anyone in Ohio’s government will do a single thing about it — or whether they’ll just call everyone who notices a bigot and keep signing the checks.
I think we all know the answer.