Ramaswamy vows to crack down in Ohio amid reports of rampant fraud in the state

Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is vowing to crack down on fraud in Ohio following reports of rampant fraud in the state.

“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 Channel’s Kayleigh McEnany on “Saturday in America.”

“I think the right answer is any instance of waste, fraud, abuse [deserves] 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,” Ramaswamy added.

Ramaswamy said the issues are “downstream policies of an overgrown federal welfare state,” which he added is “a big problem.”

“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,” Ramaswamy added. “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.”

State officials have pushed back on the allegations, broadly acknowledging concerns about Medicaid fraud allegations and vowing to double down on reviews. However, they are stopping short of saying how widespread they believe the fraud is.

In response to a request from Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, in a May 1 letter, said there are “plans to undertake an immediate revalidation of high-risk providers and will also submit within the next 30 days our comprehensive and aggressive provider revalidation plan and timeline, as requested.”

Speaking to Fox Business Channel on Friday, Daily Wire investigative journalist Luke Rosiak detailed his series and called out the governor for dismissing the allegations after the first report.

“Well, it’s interesting because we’re doing a five-part series at the Daily Wire, and after part one, he said, ‘You guys didn’t find anything,’ and he didn’t even wait to see what we had,” Rosiak said. “But we’re talking about $1 billion a year in what I call free butlers for Somalis. These are people who are paid to go to your house and cook and clean for you, and oftentimes …they’re almost all Somali.

“And what they’ve done is they’re doing it for their own family members, and one of the things you can actually build a government for is called conversation and companionship,” Rosiak added. “So you can charge the government an hourly rate for sitting around the dinner table talking to your family. So maybe we’ve all been missing out. We could have been submitting that bill to Medicaid.”

Rosiak said the money trail led him “directly to Columbus,” which he noted has the second-largest concentration of Somalis, after Minneapolis.

“More than 10% of all home health care businesses in the state of Ohio are all on this one block in the Somali neighborhood,” Rosiak said. “And you walk down these hallways, and there’s all these empty hallways, nobody’s in any of the offices, but they bill $10 million a year, $1 million a year.

“And you look up who owns the companies, it’s a convicted fraudster,” Rosiak added. “It’s somebody who used the … address of the teenage son of a money launderer to incorporate his business. It’s somebody who had a toilet cleaning business that then got into mental health and billed Medicaid $600,000 a month before leaving the country. It’s just a bizarre thing to see.”

In a post on X, Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent in November, Amy Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health from 2019 to 2020, vowed to crack down on “waste, fraud, and abuse,” without mentioning that she served in DeWine’s administration.

“The endless corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse that has gone on for decades in our Statehouse will come to an end when I’m governor,” Acton wrote.