Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, personally flew to Columbus, Ohio this week to blow the lid off a Medicaid fraud operation so brazen it makes your average mob front look subtle. Thanks to investigative reporting by the Daily Wire — not the New York Times, not the Washington Post — we now know that 288 Medicaid-registered home health aid companies were operating out of just seven office buildings along one road in Columbus.
Seven buildings. Two hundred and eighty-eight companies. What are they doing in there, stacking desks on top of each other?
The Daily Wire's "Medicaid Millions" investigation series, led by reporter Luke Rosiak, first uncovered the staggering scale of the grift. And unlike most investigative journalism these days — which usually just results in a Pulitzer nomination and zero consequences — this one actually brought the feds to town. Dr. Oz showed up in person, stood in Franklin County, and laid out the numbers that should make every taxpayer's blood boil.
"We also identify 288 Medicaid registered home health aid companies operating out of just seven office buildings along one nearby road," Oz said. "Some of these buildings are nearly vacant. Home health care and personal care services have become the subject of nearly all of the recent fraud prosecutions in Ohio."
Nearly vacant buildings housing hundreds of companies billing your tax dollars. Welcome to government healthcare.
The numbers are absolutely staggering. Franklin County alone accounts for more than a third of the $1.5 billion spent on home health care in the entire state of Ohio. One county. A third of the whole state's budget. That's roughly three times what you'd expect based on population, which is the kind of math that doesn't require a medical degree to understand.
Oz pointed out that Columbus is home to the second largest Somali population in the United States, after Minneapolis. The companies in question had billed approximately $250 million in Medicaid payments. A quarter of a billion dollars flowing through nearly empty office buildings. Nothing suspicious there.
"If we do this the right way, people will stop using Medicaid as a piggy bank," Oz declared.
Remember when the media spent months mocking Dr. Oz? The TV doctor. The snake oil salesman. The guy who talked about green coffee beans on daytime television. Now he's the one walking into fraud hotspots and doing what career bureaucrats at CMS never bothered to do — actually looking at where the money goes.
Vice President JD Vance, who hails from Ohio, has thrown the full weight of the White House behind the effort. Oz noted that Vance "wants the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force coming after fraudsters everywhere." The House Oversight Committee is also paying attention, which means this isn't going away quietly.
Even the landlord isn't pretending everything's fine. A spokesman for Cordoba, the New Jersey-based real estate company that owns the buildings, admitted that "the questions you're raising about how Ohio's Medicaid dollars are being used and abused are certainly legitimate ones." When the landlord concedes the questions are legitimate, you know the answers are going to be ugly.
Here's what makes this story different from the usual Washington fraud-and-forget cycle: an actual journalist at the Daily Wire did the digging, an actual Trump appointee showed up in person, and actual enforcement is happening. That's three things the old system never delivered at the same time.
The TV doctor just became Eliot Ness. And he's not done yet.