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.”
Hellbound and Down 