by WorldTribune Staff, May 5, 2026 Non-AI Real World News

“The new welfare queens aren’t the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. They’re the companies getting rich off them,” an investigative reporter has discovered.

Before the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) shut down in February, it published a massive trove of data which shows what companies are billing Medicaid for. The payouts had been kept from the public for decades.

After reviewing the data from Ohio, Luke Rosiak said what he discovered “was the most blatant waste of federal dollars that I have encountered in my two decades as an investigative reporter.”

In the first part of a series on “Medicaid Millionaries” for the Daily Wire, Rosiak noted that Ohio, like Minnesota, “has been granted waivers to expand Medicaid well beyond its original purpose. Under the guise of health care, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid beneficiaries’ homes to perform ‘homemaking’ and ‘chores’ like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these ‘personal services’ tasks don’t even have to be health care workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.”

According to a Daily Wire data analysis, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home health care in 2024, the last year for which data is available.

“Since the services are performed inside private residences, there is no way to know whether the workers went at all, or what they’re actually doing in exchange for taxpayer funds,” Rosiak wrote.

“As people have realized 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.”

One home health operator told Rosiak: “Well if the government is going to pay you to do it. People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.”

In his investigation, Rosiak found an office building in Columbus which had almost no people in it but had 94 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid.

Each company, Rosika noted, had “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.”

Records show this building alone billed taxpayers $66 million in the span of a few years.

Rosiak noted: “Sometimes a company will have a full roster of clients in its very first month, making one wonder where the clients come from. The companies don’t have websites or appear to advertise. They can’t stand out from their thousands of rivals based on price, unless they pay kickbacks, because the government pays the same to everyone.

“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.”

In upcoming segments of his series, Rosiak will chronicle:

• A politician who founded an $11 million home health care company that he appeared to run part-time — without even mentioning it in his political biography — who funded his campaign with donations from other home health care owners.

• A woman who reinvented her janitorial LLC as a “health” provider, then billed Medicaid nearly $100,000 the first month.

• A landlord who bought airplanes after renting space to hundreds of home health care companies that billed Medicaid a quarter of a billion dollars.

• A million-dollar Medicaid business owned by a couple with repeated fraud, violence, and theft convictions.

• A man who went to prison for Medicaid fraud but told the government he was too broke to pay restitution, while his neighbors and associates preside over a poverty-program empire.

• An accountant who lost his license for stealing public funds, then opened a $7 million home health company using the address of a convicted money launderer’s teenage son.

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  ‘Medicaid millionaires’: What DOGE data revealed about Ohio ‘home health care’, WorldTribune.com