The scope of Medicaid corruption: Ohio
Most people who aren’t hopelessly naive were aware that there is corruption involving government and its various handouts. But I certainly had no idea of its enormous scope until the last year or so.
Here we have what’s been going on in Ohio with the Medicaid home health program – and more revelations still to come. The most shocking thing about it, I think, is how easy it is to see, and how little oversight was being applied:
The front doors are open, but inside, the seven massive complexes appear to be largely abandoned. Smoke detectors chirp for new batteries. No one is there to change them. Some office doors have signs suggesting the owner is out to lunch, but the piles of mail outside tell a different story. Stray cats have taken up residence in the parking lots.
The government is under the impression that all of the office buildings hold thriving health care businesses. …
In all, the Cordoba-owned buildings in Columbus housed 288 businesses registered with Medicaid, The Daily Wire investigation found. Together, they charged taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars between 2018 and 2024. That’s in a city where only 6,273 people 75 or older are on Medicaid.
The Medicaid program has exploded in Ohio thanks to a waiver that expanded the medical program to include wide-ranging at-home services such as “homemaking,” allowing taxpayer money to be spent for tasks such as making the bed or working on a hairdo.
Ohio has 3,700 companies with “Home Health” in their name, according to a review of Ohio business records. In particular, it’s blown up in Columbus, which is home to the second-largest Somali population in the United States. The program has little oversight, with most of the so-called care happening inside individual homes, making it susceptible to fraud and abuse. …
Yet the home health businesses have been established as if by a machine, with some sharing nearly identical signs that suggest coordination rather than rivalry.
The authors managed to find one business that seemed to actually be operating and interviewed someone in the office (the owner’s son), who said that 70% of their clients were family members providing for family members. He added:
Asked why people wouldn’t simply help their aging parents without billing Medicaid, he said, “Well if the government will pay you to do it … it’s an incentive. I think most people nowadays, they don’t really care as much.”
You can find a tremendous amount of detail at the link.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s running for governor in Ohio, is making promises to crack down on this if he’s elected:
“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,” Ramaswamy told “Saturday in America” host Kayleigh McEnany.
“I think the right answer is any instance of waste, fraud, abuse… deserve[s] to be prosecuted, and we intend to investigate them aggressively, as well as to prosecute aggressively, to send a deterrent signal that our government is not a piggy bank, the taxpayer is not a piggy bank to be bilked.”
Some piggy bank.
Every dollar we save from fraud and corruption is likely fifty cents that doesn’t reach NGOs and the Democrats. Probably more.
Fraud is going on in North Carolina as well, where our new (Republican) elected auditor has found a 4700% increase in Medicaid autism services filings. I believe criminal investigations are underway.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/medicaid-fraud-fears-grow-amid-massive-red-state-billing-spike-sector-also-plagued-minnesota-
Asked why people wouldn’t simply help their aging parents without billing Medicaid, he said, “Well if the government will pay you to do it … it’s an incentive. I think most people nowadays, they don’t really care as much.”
I suspect a great deal has been hidden by a strategic choice of ellipsis. Clicked the link but the ellipsis is at the source.
Like any other health care, home health care is very expensive. Relatives of aged family members have the choice, they can pay for the care if they can afford it, they can do the care themselves and forgo paid employment, if they can afford it, or they can leave the aged family to take care of themselves.
There were very good intentions behind the decision to have Medicaid pay for this. If we believe in a social safety net at all, this is not an inappropriate use, provided that the guardrails against fraud had not been purposely dismantled, which they have been, and we all know why.
Not everyone believes there should be a social safety net, and they have powerful arguments. As for the good intentions, we know what is paved with those. Had there not been a desire to enable fraud, this would be no worse than any other social program and a bit better than most.
The care of aged people at home, and how that is to be paid for, is something that closely concerns all of us here, who either have aged people to help take care of or will be aged themselves and in need of care. Every dollar siphoned to fraud is a dollar not spent on care for aged people who need it, if we think that public dollars should be put to that purpose at all.
@Kate:a 4700% increase in Medicaid autism services filings
My state started going through this five years ago.
Niketas:
Thing is, if there’s a safety net on this, only Medicaid recipients can get it. Home health care is so expensive that the middle class can’t afford to pay out of pocket or for insurance.
@neo:Thing is, if there’s a safety net on this, only Medicaid recipients can get it.
Not sure what there is to say about that really. The non-fraudulent Medicaid population is mostly moms with kids, with the rest being the poorest and/or sickest people. In the Deep South between 60% and 80% of kids are Medicaid. I wish I could I could say this was invariably true that it is the most vulnerable population but it isn’t quite as I know too well from my day job, but it’s close. The people on Medicaid would be the ones, in principle, who have the hardest time affording it, putting aside fraud for the moment.
If it’s unaffordable for other people as well, that’s a bummer, and if we want to rework our social programs so that if people not in the program can’t afford it we should not make it available to people in the programs, I guess we could do that.
Thinking about the home health care option, and the possibility of some of it being done in the future via robots and/or screen aided IT systems of some form; but that older people may lose their memories even of how to operate these devices or not be too savvy about this tech in any case.
Can we expect AI to be able to handle people with dementia of some forms?
Aid for people with physical limitations seems potentially useful and beneficial and possible.
Aid for people with memory and other cognitive lapses – perhaps not so much?
In the Deep South between 60% and 80% of kids are Medicaid.
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The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Census Bureau have the data on child enrollment.
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40%: South Carolina
44%: Arkansas
49%: Georgia
49%: Alabama
51%: Mississippi
63%: Louisiana