MM#481--Local News Saw $180K While Records Pointed To $1B

Welcome And Ohio Fraud Hook

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

Nine Providers Versus A Billion

How The Waiver Fraud Works

Shell Companies And Light Penalties

Who Built And Kept It Running

Why Local News Stayed Small

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. This is a video and audio podcast. Hello there. My home state of Ohio is in the news. Local news has covered a nine provider Medicaid fraud story. And the headline is$180,000 in bogus billing. But Luke Rosiak at the Daily Wire found the same fraud at a billion dollars a year using the same Ohio records. Same state, same program, nine providers versus hundreds of shell companies. Why did local news stop at the small story? That's what we're getting into today. Luke Rosiak just published an investigation called Medicaid Millionaires. Fantastic story. What he found in Ohio is staggering. Hundreds of shell companies, fake addresses, family members billing the state for care. It was never delivered. Over a billion dollars with a B. Over a billion dollars a year flowing through a system with almost no oversight. Zero oversight. And here's what makes this story different. It isn't just a fraud story, it's a political story. It's a media story because the people closest to it are looking away. In this video, I'm going to give you three nuggets of wisdom from this investigation. Nugget number one, how the fraud works. Nugget number two, who built the system that allowed it. Nugget number three, how local news covered the small stories and buried the big ones. Three nuggets, let's roll. So how do you steal a billion dollars from Medicaid without getting caught? It turns out it's surprisingly simple. Ohio has something called a Medicaid home health waiver. The idea is straightforward. Instead of sending elderly and disabled people to nursing homes, the state pays for care at home. You know, cooking and cleaning and personal care. Sounds reasonable. Everybody's on board with that. And for a lot of people, it is. But here's the vulnerability. The program runs on the honor system. Yes, the honor system. All you need to tap into this program is an NPI number, a national provider identifier number. Get that number, set up the LLC, and you can start billing. Rosiac found one building in Columbus with 93, 93 different companies registered at the same address. That building, it's mostly empty. Those 93 companies build 66 million dollars in Medicaid. Another set of buildings owned by somebody named Cordoba had 288 Medicaid billing companies registered to them. Over six years, more than a quarter billion of dollars was billed. And the workers, their family members, sign your adult son up as a caregiver. His only client is you, his mother. The state pays, nobody verifies. Done. How many Medicaid recipients, age 75 and over, are there in Columbus, Ohio? 6,200. That's it. The billing volume for that number of people doesn't even come close. Doesn't even add up. This wasn't an accident. This was a program designed designed, frankly, in a way that invited exploitation. And hundreds of people took that invitation. Now here's the question nobody in Ohio wants to answer. Who built the system? Because somebody signed off on it, somebody expanded it, and somebody kept it running. And the answer should make every fiscal conservative in Ohio extremely uncomfortable. So the home community-based service waiver program, you know, the ones that are being exploited now, they go back decades. And here's what changed the scale. The scale changed. Governor John Kasich, sir, from 2011 to 2019, he was the governor who pushed Ohio Medicaid expansion. And he did it under Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. Or he used the federal waiver authority to dramatically grow the program. More people, more dollars, more vendors flowing through the system. Casey Grant as a fiscal conservative. He championed this expansion anyway, push back against the local GOP doing so. And the result was Medicaid architecture that made it, in the words of this report, frankly, easier to quote, shovel money through poorly policed home health and personal care vendors. So then comes Governor Mike DeWine. Milkedtoast Mike, as he's known locally here, 2019 to today. That's when he is served. Did he close the spending channels? Did he restructure the oversight? Nah, not really. He's been seeking work requirements through waiver authority, tinkering at the margins, while the underlying machine just kept running and running. So you have two governors, Republican governors, both ran on responsibility and accountability. Both oversaw a system that a Daily Wire reporter, an intrepid reporter, found out about. He had to expose it. Not the auditors in the system. And guess what? When the Franklin County auditor did look at one company called Omega, he found that what they called impossible claims. A patient was in the hospital and a home visit was being billed at the exact same time. Do you know what the recommended penalty was? Wait for it.$1,000. A thousand dollars. Might have got a thousand dollars billed from the hospital. So this isn't just fraud. This is what happens when a system grows faster than the accountability structures can and were designed to watch it. You know, Kasich expanded the money and DeWine just inherited that architecture, and nobody on either side was watching the door. Now, if this gets your blood boiling like it has mine, hit the like and subscribe button. This is exactly the kind of story that needs more eyes on it. So let's keep going. Here's the part that should bother you most. Not the fraud, not the empty offices, not the thousand dollar slap on the wrist. The fact that local Ohio news did cover the story, just not the real version of it. And I want to be precise here because Ohio local news outlets, including the Ohio Attorney General's own press releases, covered the Medicaid fraud. I'm not saying they ignored it completely. They just published stories like quote, nine Medicaid providers facing fraud and theft charges. They reported on$180,000 in bogus billing. They treated it as a routine crime story. You know, nine bad actors,$180,000. Case closed. Luke Rosiak. Luke Rosiak looked at the same Ohio records, the same program, and found not nine providers, hundreds, not a hundred and eighty thousand dollars, a billion. Same state, same data, completely different story. Not one major Columbus or statewide newsroom, the outlets that cover Ohio politics every single day, took Rosiak's billion dollar findings and did their own deep dive for local audiences. Not one. So who did pick it up? National conservative media, the Daily Wire, did the reporting, obviously. Fox News ran a whistleblower segment on it. The GOP Majority Whip posted on X. Quote, everyone needs to read this jaw-dropping report. Absolutely. Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Real America's Voice. Now think about that. Think about that dynamic for a second. The press closest to the story, the local reporters with Ohio sources, Ohio contacts, Ohio credibility covered the small arrest, and then they walk away. The press furthest from the story, national conservative commentators in New York, Los Angeles, DC, they all connect the dots. How? Why? Ask yourself who this story implicates. John Kasich, a Republican who became a media darling by opposing Trump. He's a complicated figure for Ohio local media to go after. Mike DeWine, Milk Toast Mike, a sitting governor whose office controls press access and Medicaid expansion itself, a policy most mainstream outlets have a they frankly spent a decade defending. You touch this story and you're touching all three of those things at once. That's the complicated calculation for the local newsroom. So Luke was yak, he's an intrepid reporter. He did the work. Good on you, Luke. The GOP whip, he amplified it. Fox ran a whistleblower story, and your local Ohio News, eh, they're still calling it a routine crime story. Now we did see where Vice President Vance is on the case. Thank God. Here's the truth, though, the scale of this scandal is not determined by the size of the outlet that covers it. It's determined by the facts. We should all want that. And the facts here are a billion dollars a year. Hundreds of shell companies and a local press corps that looked at the tip of the iceberg and reported only on the tip. So nine providers charged$180,000 in bogus billing. That was the local Ohio story. Hundreds of shell companies, one building with 93 LLCs, a quarter of a billion dollars from one landlord alone. That was Luke Rosiak's story. Again, good on you, Luke. Very good intrepid reporter there. Same state, same records, same program. One reporter just asked bigger questions. So what say you? Is this local media incompetence or is it something more deliberate? And does it matter that the only people covering the billion-dollar version of this story are the national conservative outlets? Drop your comment below and let me know what you think. And most importantly, as always, let's keep fighting the good fight. Hey, if this story got your blood boiling, you need to watch this next video because the media did the exact same thing with the new American Pope. They buried the real story and then they sold you a different one. So click right there, and you're gonna want to see this.

SPEAKER_00 13:10

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