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A new investigative report exposes how dozens of fraudulent home health care companies in Columbus, Ohio, have bilked Medicaid out of tens of millions in taxpayer dollars.

Rampant fraud committed by Somali immigrants in Minnesota captured national headlines late in 2025 and early this year, prompting President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance to form a task force dedicated to tackling the abuse of America’s generous welfare funds. Now, a major new report is shedding light on the sprawling home health care fraud stripping American taxpayers in Ohio of tens of millions of dollars.

According to investigative reporter Luke Rosiak of The Daily Wire, Somali immigrants in the Buckeye State’s capital city of Columbus — which boasts one of the nation’s largest Somali populations, second only to Minneapolis — have opened dozens of “businesses” billing tens of millions of dollars to Medicaid for “home health care.” Almost all of it is fraudulent.

“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,” Rosiak wrote in his report, the first of a planned “Medicaid Millionaires” series.

“As people have realised 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. 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.”

Dozens of Shell Companies, One Building, $66 Million in Fraudulent Claims

In 2024, the last year for which data is available, Ohio spent at least $1 billion on home health care. Over the course of just a few years, nearly 100 offices located in the same building in Columbus billed taxpayers $66 million in Medicaid payments for home health care services.

Each of the 94 companies housed in the Busch Boulevard building has “a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in ‘Home Health LLC’ — and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break,” Rosiak reported. “Its lack of windows would be a problem for most office buildings, but there is almost no one in this one.”

“Nearly every owner of home health care companies in Columbus appears to be foreign. They live in a parallel society, where every associate in public records also has a foreign name, and all their business transactions are conducted with other foreigners,” Rosiak wrote.

Names registered as the owners or operators of the curiously lucrative “home health care” companies include Liban Mohamed, Mohamed Hussein, Abdul Sesay, Abdallah Kitwara, and other common Somali names.

“The government cannot be meaningfully monitoring all the people it writes million-dollar checks to in Columbus. They all share combinations of just a few names, like Ahmed Mohamed and Mohamed Ahmed,” the investigative reporter observed.

“Documents reviewed by The Daily Wire show individuals will spell their own name multiple different ways within a single document. And many of them list their birthday as January 1, because their birthdates are unknown.”

When Rosiak asked one of the “home health care” business owners what his business actually did, he responded, “Journalists? Who cares? Do you guys pay my bills? I’m going to tell everybody you guys are racist.”

A Foolproof Business Model: Getting Paid to Care for Your Own Family

The “home health care” industry, Rosiak explained, is almost impossible to monitor for accountability or transparency, since the services billed are located inside private residences. It simply isn’t possible to verify whether a “home health care” employee has done the job he showed up to do, or whether he even showed up at all — especially when a vast number of “home health care” workers are family members of those supposedly in need of “home health care.” Some of the “services” provided include tasks such as “homemaking” or “chores,” like cooking or cleaning, or even just “companionship and conversation.”

Rosiak summarised, “The business model is simple: a 40-year-old Somali immigrant gets paid for spending time with, and maybe cooking for, his own 65-year-old mother. The middleman is one of thousands of ‘home health’ firms that have the ‘NPI’ number necessary to bill Medicaid.”

He added, “The 40-year-old becomes an ‘employee’ of that company, but has no clients other than his mother. There is no way to verify whether he actually even provided the ‘services’ — unless his own mother is willing to testify against him.”

Criminal Histories, Failed Businesses — and Sudden Medicaid Millions

The owners of the booming “home health care” companies, Rosiak and his investigative team found, were often those who repeatedly failed at running other business ventures, and, in many cases, were dogged by reports and allegations of insolvency or fraud and other crimes.

“Pick the owner of a Columbus home health care company at random and look him up in public records, and you are likely to go down an endless rabbit hole,” Rosiak wrote, “years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, and an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they make from Medicaid are just a side gig.”

One such individual was an accountant who “lost his license for stealing public funds,” but managed to open a multi-million-dollar “home health care” business using a false address — the address of the teenage son of a convicted money launderer. One couple owned a million-dollar “home health care” company, despite numerous convictions for fraud, theft, and even violence.

Another individual tracked by Rosiak was a politician who seemingly tried to hide his ownership of an $11 million “home health care” company that he apparently ran on a part-time basis. The bulk of his campaign donations came from the owners of other “home health care” companies in the area.

“These are not business geniuses, nor even people with any training or specialty in the health field. They have often failed at a variety of businesses before suddenly becoming millionaires in home health care,” Rosiak wrote. “The new welfare queens aren’t the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. They’re the companies getting rich off them.”

Vance Pledges Federal Investigation Into Ohio Medicaid Fraud

Earlier this year, in response to the rampant welfare fraud committed by Somali immigrants in Minnesota, the vice president was charged with leading a task force to root out and halt fraud and the abuse of taxpayer dollars. In response to Rosiak’s reporting, Vance pledged to launch federal investigations in his home state of Ohio.

“These shocking allegations, if true, show why the Fraud Task Force’s work is so important,” the vice president said in a social media post Monday. “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.”

In his report, Rosiak noted that the fraudulent abuse of Medicaid funds differs even from the abuse of welfare treasuries like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), since Medicaid funds are “non-discretionary” spending — and thus often exempt from cost-cutting measures — and rely only on the signature of a single doctor, any doctor, to verify that a patient is in need of a particular service.

“This blatant waste happened within miles of the Ohio state capitol, where Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, and his appointees run the state,” Rosiak observed. “In an age of artificial intelligence, the Medicaid system has seemed disinterested in even the most obvious red flags. Perhaps that’s because it’s largely run by states, but with half or more of the bill being footed by federal taxpayers.”

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Republished with thanks to The Washington Stand. Image courtesy of Adobe.