Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy is calling for a major crackdown on Medicaid fraud in the state after a probe allegedly uncovered millions of dollars in taxpayer funds being funneled to nonexistent home-healthcare companies.
The investigation found 288 separate Ohio home-healthcare companies with the same address — while listed locations for some of the supposed businesses appeared run-down or abandoned with no evidence any services were actually being provided.
“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 Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany during an appearance on “Saturday in America.”
“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,” he said.
The billionaire Republican candidate sounded the alarm after the recent Daily Wire report alleging widespread fraud reminiscent of what investigators found at dozens of purported childcare businesses operating in Minneapolis in recent months.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s office fired back at Ramaswamy’s suggestion that social-services fraud is happening unchecked in the state.
In a statement to Fox News, DeWine’s office claimed Ohio has “extensive oversight mechanisms in place,” including “electronic visit verification for hourly care, requiring signed daily activity logs, conducting audits and surveys performing background checks on providers, and reassessing medical needs regularly.”
The term-limited governor’s office cited additional existing measures to root out would-be scammers, including “internal agency efforts to fight waste, fraud and abuse.”
In a statement to the outlet, the Ohio Department of Medicaid acknowledged the concerns the article raised, particularly in Franklin County, and said it has been “actively investigating these matters” even before the report was published.
“Upon initial review, some of the entities mentioned in the series are no longer Ohio Medicaid providers or have not billed Medicaid in several years. Some other providers are subject to ongoing investigation,” the statement said.
Ramaswamy chalked up the alleged rampant fraud as “downstream policies” of open borders and an “overgrown federal welfare state.
“That’s a big problem,” he said.
“We can’t fix the past. We can fix the future, and one of the things that I intend to do is to just take a dispassionate look at this,” he said.
“It’s not just responding to one news story or another as a game of whack-a-mole. The way I look at this is this is more of a broken-windows theory, which means that, if you have a broken window somewhere, it’s a reminder that we have to take a systematic look at the whole thing.”
