Somali Fraud Costs Taxpayers Billions In Ohio
Like so many government programs, Medicaid waivers that allow family members to care for a loved one at home began with the best intentions. Ideally it lets infirm folks stay at home while Medicaid pays home health workers - often family members - to care for them.
But once Somali immigrants realized how easy it was to scam the system - and if nothing else, this particular group of immigrants is skilled at corruption - Ohio’s Medicaid program turned into a grotesque fraud festival.
Beginning yesterday and continuing all week, ace reporter Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire is exposing the massive corruption and theft that left taxpayers on the hook for billions in Ohio.
Columbus, the epicenter of the fraud, has the second largest Somali population in the country. That’s not a coincidence. Virtually all of the fraudsters Rosiak found were Somalis.
Like their fellow countrymen in Minneapolis who opened bogus day care and autism centers with precious few children, these immigrants proved adept at gaming the healthcare system.
Or put less delicately, they have a talent for theft.
I set my sights on Ohio, which 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. An infinite number of small black boxes inside a black box. Multiple signs said the service provided, and billed to the government, was sometimes just “companionship & conversation.”
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.
“Well if the government is going to pay you to do it,” one home health operator told me. “People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.
That’s the spirit! Why integrate into a society that has taken you in when you can rob its citizens blind with your cunning schemes?
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: 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.
We went down several of those rabbit holes. In the coming days, you’ll meet:
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.
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.
The problem is, America is considered a relatively high-trust country. We have strong social cohesion and most Americans will act honestly even without the threat of laws or punishment.
Somalia, on the other hand, is considered one of the most corrupt nations on earth. Based on the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), South Sudan and Somalia are generally ranked as “the most corrupt countries in the world, often tying for the bottom spot…These nations struggle with severe public sector corruption, lack of institutional oversight, and ongoing conflict.”
Import thousands of people from corrupt-third world hellholes and this is what you get. President Trump is correct, we don’t need any more immigrants from Somalia. We need to deport the ones who have been bilking taxpayers.
Somalian migrants in Ohio quickly saw an opportunity to scam taxpayers with a Medicaid system that is devilishly hard to monitor.
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. 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.
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.
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.
A perfect set-up for thieves.
Let’s hope Rosiak’s reporting leads to indictments, deportations and an end to immigration from Somalia.
American taxpayers are sick of the grift.
