288 Home-Health Companies.
Seven Buildings. $250 Million in Medicaid Billings.
The House Just Opened a Probe.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY-01) on Tuesday tapped Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX-26) to lead a new investigative panel — the “Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses” — and assigned its first case before the ink was dry: a federal probe into the Ohio Department of Medicaid’s home- and community-based-services program, where a Daily Wire investigation has identified 288 home-health companies operating from just seven Columbus addresses that collectively billed Medicaid more than $250 million between 2018 and 2024.
The companies share addresses in office buildings that, per the reporting, appear vacant or in poor condition. Many were registered in a single Columbus neighborhood. Investigators say $1.1 billion in Ohio Medicaid home-health claimswere filed without working electronic visit verification — the federally required GPS-and-timestamp check that is supposed to confirm a caregiver actually showed up. Ohio paid Sandata $146 million to build that EVV system. It is, on roughly half of all visits, switched off.
Comer and Gill sent a formal document-demand letter to Ohio Medicaid Director Scott Partika — an appointee of Republican Governor Mike DeWine. Ohio is a Republican-governed state. The accountability target here is not a partisan jurisdiction; it is the program-integrity gap between $37 billion in officially counted federal Medicaid improper payments and what outside analysts estimate may be three to five times that number once the managed-care blind spot is reopened.
- $250MMedicaid billed by 288 firms (2018–2024)288 home-health companies sharing seven Columbus addresses billed the Ohio Medicaid HCBS waiver program $250M over six years — Daily Wire investigation reviewed by House Oversight.
- $1.1BOhio claims billed without working EVV$1.1 billion in Ohio Medicaid home-health claims submitted without functional electronic visit verification — the federal GPS-and-timestamp check that confirms a caregiver was actually present.
- $37.39Bofficial FY2025 federal Medicaid improper paymentsCMS Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) — Medicaid's 6.12% improper-payment rate, up from 5.09% / $31.10B in FY2024. 77% of the errors are documentation gaps, not confirmed fraud.
- $150–180BParagon estimate of true annual Medicaid lossParagon Health Institute analysis: PERM excludes managed-care provider-level payments (~67% of enrollees) and relies on incomplete eligibility checks; full audits in 2019-2020 produced a 27% error rate.
- 161Ohio Medicaid fraud convictions since 2019Ohio AG Dave Yost's Health Care Fraud Section + the state Medicaid Fraud Control Unit have secured 161 convictions since 2019; the Auditor's office has flagged a potential additional $4.5B in improper payments.
Authorizing chairman: Rep. James Comer (R-KY-01), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform — the chamber’s lead investigative committee, with subpoena power across the entire executive branch and any program receiving federal funds.
Task force chair: Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX-26)— freshman member of the Oversight Committee, named to lead the panel on May 13, 2026.
Authorization: Six months, with hearings expected at a later date. The task force’s first action was a document-demand letter to the Ohio Department of Medicaid sent Tuesday.
Parallel inquiry: The House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has direct jurisdiction over Medicaid, is running its own investigation in parallel. E&C Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY-02), Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee Chairman John Joyce (R-PA-13), and Health Subcommittee Chairman Morgan Griffith (R-VA-09) have expanded their inquiry to ten additional states, including New York and California.
Federal handoff: Per Daily Signal reporting, the Daily Wire’s investigative file is being forwarded to a federal anti-fraud task force chaired by Vice President JD Vance. Ohio AG Dave Yost (R)’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit is running its own state-level prosecutions.
“The current Medicaid system either does not have sufficient internal controls to prevent and detect fraud, or is not conducting proper oversight of these HCBS providers. Americans across the country are paying for this fraud while vulnerable patients are being exploited.”
Reps. James Comer (R-KY) & Brandon Gill (R-TX) · Letter to Ohio Medicaid Director Scott Partika · May 12, 2026
Apr. 3, 2026 — President Trump names VP JD Vance the 'Fraud Czar' and lists California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, and New York as the priority targets.
The Daily Wire’s investigation, by reporter Luke Rosiak with contributions from Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center, did not name every one of the 288 firms. It documented the structural pattern that triggered the House probe: dozens of Medicaid-billing entities clustered into a handful of addresses, in office buildings that look like nothing is happening inside.
The cluster: 288 home-health companies registered with Ohio Medicaid sharing just seven Columbus office buildings. Per the reporting, those seven buildings — concentrated in one Columbus neighborhood — house roughly 10% of the entire state’s registered home-health-company population.
The billings: Those 288 firms collectively billed Medicaid more than $250 million between 2018 and 2024for home- and community-based services — the program that pays caregivers (often relatives) to assist Medicaid recipients with daily living tasks in their own homes.
The verification gap: Of the broader Ohio home-health spend, $1.1 billion in claimswere submitted without working electronic visit verification — the federally mandated GPS-and-timestamp check that proves a caregiver actually arrived. Ohio paid Sandata $146 million to build the EVV system. Ohio Medicaid spokeswoman Stephanie O’Grady confirmed that GPS is off on roughly half of home visits and that, since July 1, 2024, GPS may only be activated “with the signed consent of the individual receiving services” — a consent loophole that effectively neuters the verification requirement.
The waiver design: The Ohio Medicaid HCBS waiver program permits Medicaid recipients to be paid for providing homemaking, chores, and personal care — including for their own relatives. That structural feature is legal and valuable when used as designed; it is also the precise mechanism the alleged 288-company cluster appears to be exploiting.
Other patterns flagged: Reporting from The Daily Signal noted that some operators of the suspect home-health companies are also registered in the trucking industry — a cross-sector pattern Auditor Faber has flagged separately as a fraud signature.
Tweet your favorite Columbus, Ohio Medicaid mill. These 7 buildings are owned by one New Jersey-based landlord, mostly on one street. Collectively they are desolate inside but house 288 Medicaid LLCs that billed a quarter billion dollars of taxpayer money.
Everyone needs to read this jaw-dropping report by @lukerosiak. Medicaid has become a breeding ground for fraud beyond our wildest comprehension. Even worse, it’s being weaponized mostly by foreigners with no regard or gratitude for our nation’s generosity.
The Ohio cluster is not an outlier. It is a single visible spike on a national surface that federal program-integrity tools are no longer designed to measure honestly.
The official CMS number: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published a FY2025 Medicaid improper-payment estimate of $37.39 billion— a 6.12% rate, up from $31.10 billion (5.09%) in FY2024. CMS’s methodology is the Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) program. CMS itself cautions that 77.17% of those flagged errors are insufficient documentation rather than confirmed fraud.
The Paragon estimate: The Paragon Health Institute, drawing on a Blase / Greszler analysis, argues that the true Medicaid improper-payment rate runs three to five times the CMS figure — on the order of $150 billion to $180 billion per year. Their reasoning: PERM excludes provider-level payments inside managed-care organizations (which now cover roughly 67% of all Medicaid enrollees) and relies on eligibility checks that were partly suspended during COVID and remain incomplete on a rolling three-year average. When eligibility checks were fully implemented in 2019–2020, observed error rates spiked to roughly 27%.
The decade math: Applying a 25% improper-payment rate to 2015–2024 federal Medicaid spending yields a Paragon estimate of approximately $1.1 trillion in improper payments over the decade. That is the size of the integrity gap the Comer-Gill task force and the parallel E&C inquiry are pointing at — with Ohio as Exhibit A, not Exhibit One Of One.
The HHS-OIG layer: The HHS Office of Inspector General’s Medicaid Fraud Strike Force tracks active provider-fraud cases across all 50 states; current enforcement actions include 10 Medicaid providers facing federal charges in addition to the 161 Ohio convictions secured since 2019.
These shocking allegations, if true, show why the Fraud Task Force’s work is so important. I’m directing the task force to look into it and take immediate action to prosecute any fraudsters involved and stop all further payments as appropriate.
Governor: Mike DeWine (R), second term, in office since 2019.
Lieutenant Governor: Jim Tressel (R), the former Ohio State football coach, appointed February 2025.
Ohio Department of Medicaid Director: Scott Partika— DeWine appointee, addressee of the Comer-Gill document-demand letter sent May 12, 2026.
Attorney General: Dave Yost (R)— runs the state Medicaid Fraud Control Unit; recent indictments charged 10 providers with stealing a combined $578,000 from Ohio Medicaid.
Auditor of State: Keith Faber (R)— the office that surfaced the $1.75M Lucas County behavioral-health overbilling, the EVV-coverage gap, and an estimated “up to $4.4 billion” in potentially improper payments if a 15.6% sample error rate extrapolates statewide.
The political wrinkle: The 2026 Ohio gubernatorial race features Vivek Ramaswamy (R), who has built “the $40-plus billion in state Medicaid dollars” into a centerpiece campaign issue, pledging to “investigate them aggressively, as well as to prosecute aggressively, to send a deterrent signal that our government is not a piggy bank.” DeWine’s office has disputed the broader characterization, pointing to existing oversight mechanisms.
Whistleblower in public: Attorney Mehek Cooke, a former Ohio assistant attorney general, has gone on Fox News describing how the home-health-fraud pattern affects the Somali immigrant community in both Ohio and Minnesota — a cross-state pattern federal investigators are now reviewing.
I refuse to tolerate this kind of waste, fraud, & abuse in Medicaid. We’ll prosecute aggressively & put the money back in the pockets of law-abiding Ohioans. The dollar amount will be far greater than most people expect.
On the show today: The Daily Wire breaks more shocking news on Medicaid fraud in Ohio, and Vivek Ramaswamy joins us to talk about how to stop it…
Medicaid Fraud Strike Forces have existed in some form since the 1970s. The HHS-OIG and DOJ run a joint National Health Care Fraud Strike Force; every state operates its own Medicaid Fraud Control Unit funded 75% by HHS. Convictions accumulate — Ohio alone has logged 161 since 2019. The structural problem is that the convictions are downstream of the billing, sometimes by years.
What is different about the Comer-Gill task force is the upstream framing. The letter to Director Partika does not ask Ohio to prosecute more bad actors. It asks Ohio to explain why the state-level system permitted 288 home-health companies to register at the same seven addresses, bill $250 million in federal-state Medicaid funds, and operate for six years before a private-sector investigative outfit identified the pattern from public records. The implicit answer the task force is looking for — and the answer the parallel Energy & Commerce inquiry is testing in ten more states — is that the program-integrity controls that should have flagged this cluster on day one are either turned off or pointed somewhere else.
That is also why the dollar figure to keep track of is not the $250 million in the Columbus case. It is the $37 billion CMS counts each year, the $150 billion outside analysts say is closer to the truth, and the $1.1 trillion-over-a-decade implication if either estimate is roughly right. Ohio is the case that opened the door. The room behind it is national.
House Oversight just opened a six-month probe into 288 Ohio home-health companies sharing seven Columbus addresses and $250 million in Medicaid billings. Ohio is run by Republicans — Gov. DeWine, AG Yost, Auditor Faber. The accountability target is not a party. It is the federal-state program-integrity floor that lets a $37-billion-counted, $150-billion-estimated leak run year after year, with the convictions arriving long after the money is gone.