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.