Swansenreport

Oz Lands in Columbus: 288 Medicaid Companies in 7 Buildings, One County Eating a Third of Ohio’s Home Health Budget

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz made a personal visit to Franklin County, Ohio this week, standing outside a cluster of nearly vacant office buildings where 288 Medicaid-registered home health companies are listed — in what he described as a pattern of fraud so concentrated it has distorted the entire state’s Medicaid spending profile.

Oz said data mining identified 288 Medicaid-registered home health aid companies operating out of just seven office buildings along one nearby road in Columbus. “Some of these buildings are nearly vacant,” he said. “Home health care and personal care services have become the subject of nearly all of the recent fraud prosecutions in Ohio.” The Ohio auditor found that nearly half of all personal care services claims in the state had no electronic verification — making it impossible to confirm the services were ever provided. Daily Wire

The spending anomaly Oz cited is striking: Franklin County alone accounts for 38 percent of all Medicaid home health spending in Ohio — roughly three times what would be expected based on its share of the state’s population. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Oz said. He called on Gov. Mike DeWine and other governors to partner with federal investigators. “We are coming for you. Don’t walk away from us. Run. Because we are going to catch you wherever you are.” Fox News

One nuance the non-partisan Ohio Statehouse News Bureau noted in its coverage: Franklin County is also the most populous county in Ohio, which partially explains elevated raw spending there — though not a 3x concentration factor. That caveat doesn’t diminish the core finding, but it’s worth knowing.

The Ohio visit comes days after the Daily Wire published an investigation into the Columbus-area home health fraud cluster. The story is part of a broader pattern the Trump administration has been documenting all spring: the same home health and personal care attendant fraud structure that fueled the Minnesota Feeding Our Future scandal has been replicated in Ohio, and investigators believe it exists at scale in other states as well. Oz said the fraud pattern is “nationwide” and called for every state to implement electronic visit verification that cannot be gamed. Wislawjournal

The Minnesota connection deserves specific mention for Swansenreport readers. The autism therapy fraud case you covered last week — involving Shamso Ahmed Hassan’s two Columbus-area clinics as well as her Feeding Our Future fraud — directly bridges the Ohio and Minnesota networks. The same community, the same Medicaid programs, the same ghost-visit billing schemes. Oz’s Columbus visit suggests the crackdown that began in Minneapolis is now expanding to the second-largest Somali-American population center in the country.

Sources: Daily Wire — Original Investigation | NBC4 Columbus / WCMH | Ohio Statehouse News Bureau / WOSU | 10TV Columbus