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- [00:04]
A
You've heard the headlines out of Ohio, but the fraud story there is even bigger and stranger than it looks today. We're excited to share with you a brand new podcast, Morning Wire presents. Behind the story. Join Daily Wire's D.C. bureau Chief, Tim Rice and his guest, investigative reporter Luke Rosiak, as they go behind the scenes to reveal the questions that started it all, as well as the questions that still don't have answers.
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B
I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley. And here's behind the Story.
- [00:38]
A
Hello, I'm Tim Rice. Welcome to behind the Story. By now, you've almost certainly heard that fraud is rampant in the American heartland. From Minnesota's Quality Leering center to Ohio's home healthcare boondoggle, fraudsters are bleeding taxpayers while patting their own pockets and potentially putting Americans at risk. Vice President J.D. vance, who recently launched a task force to combat this fraud, has made sure to zero in on this human element of the problem. Inside every scam daycare are children being neglected. Every imposter home health worker billing Medicaid has an incentive to pump their charges with drugs they don't need, drugs that could do more harm than good. Any effort to expose this fraud is valiant, but the notion that all we need is someone with a phone willing to catch the fraudsters in action is a little misguided. To be sure. Exposure is a crucial first step in this process, but. But it is only a first step to really make a difference. We need journalists who go beyond the viral clip, who connect the dots, who make such impenetrable cases that lawmakers have no choice but to act and the public can't turn away. Daily Wire's senior investigative reporter, Luke Rosiak is one of those journalists. Luke spent months digging into Columbus, Ohio's Medicaid fraud ring. He went to the buildings and confronted the fraudsters. And then the real work began. Using a combination of shoe leather journalism and some serious computer coding skills, Rosiak exposed one of the biggest fraud rings in the country and prompted Washington to take swift, tangible action. Luke Rosiak joins us today to explain just how he did it. The series headline is Medicaid Millions. Let's go behind the Story. Luke, thank you so much for joining me.
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B
Hey, Tim, that was a great intro. Thanks for having me. How you doing?
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A
I'm doing great. So, look, I want to, I think by now most of our, you know, readers and listeners have, have not seen and read your story, which I encourage everyone to do. They've certainly heard about it. This is all over the news, you got all of Washington abuzz. The vice president's been talking about it. So I don't want to spend too much time going into the specifics, but why don't you just give us the. Give us the summary of, you know, what's going on. How do we get here?
- [02:51]
B
Sure. You know, I call it jokingly, the Free Butlers for Somalis program, because this is a way that people have found to get people to. People paid to do cooking and cleaning for them. And a lot of times what they'll do is have their own family members be paid for those tasks. And the tasks can also include, quote, companionship and conversation. So it's a way to get paid for hanging out with your own family. It started as a way to save money by, if somebody needed to be in a nursing home, they could get some care at home instead. But then it was expanded and loopholes were added, and certain people started sort of exploiting it at scale. And so in Columbus, Ohio, it's the Somali community. I mean, there's not really a need to beat around the bush because it's like 99% Somali. When I went there, that was doing this. And they just have massive. The whole town, you know, this whole row of, this whole street basically is full of businesses that are essentially middleman businesses that will then pay people to hang out at their houses. But there's a lot of red flags in the backgrounds of the people that own these companies that raise questions about whether the people are really sick and for those that aren't hanging out with their families. But they have a roster of private clients that they say they visit, whether they're visiting them at all. So it's basically massive Medicaid waste. And, you know, in my view, a lot of it is fraud. But. But it's difficult to. To prove the fraud sometimes because it's happening behind closed doors. But just crazy stuff like this company will be founded by somebody with whose wife, whose husband was previously convicted of running an exact scheme on this thing. Or they, you know, they put the company in the name of a teenage son of a convicted money launderer or, you know, a husband and wife own one of these businesses, have multiple fraud and theft convictions. So it's really this Medicaid waiver for home healthcare and specifically what they call personal services has been a magnet for. For fraud at a huge scale, like a billion dollars a year in, in. In Ohio alone.
- [05:06]
A
So, I mean, that's. It's so big. That's so big, and it Seems, you know, again, the examples that you cite in your stories, I mean, you talk about go into these buildings and just like there are, you know, signs saying we'll be back. And, you know, it's clear that no one's been in these buildings in months. There are debt collection notices and warnings, letters. You found unopened letters, post dated, postmarked 6 months before you were there. So how is it that no one noticed this before? To say nothing of doing anything? Right, because like, there's, that's a different. We can get into the politicians failing to act. But like, how did no one notice this? And how did you, how were you the first person to notice this?
- [05:43]
B
It's a great question because it isn't, it wasn't secret. It's like as blatant as they literally had it on billboards. Get paid to hang out. Get paid to take care of your own family. Literally giant billboards. As you're driving down the road and you can see like all the other businesses have just gone, gone out of business and been replaced by these healthcare firms. And so this is all happening just a couple miles from the state capitol, where Ohio is run entirely by Republicans and literally like down the street in Columbus. So it says a lot about either people's gullibility or maybe they're living in a bubble. Maybe the, the, the wealthy white liberals don't hang out in the Somali part of town and nobody really went there, but it's only a little drive and none of it is really concealed at all. And so the inroad into it for me was a database that was released by the Department of Health and Human Services at the urging of Doge. Let's meet today. And they all got together and talked. And now you need to give us $100,000, you know, whatever it is. Like, the dollar amounts are shockingly high for these companies. A million dollars a month is common. And so for the first time we were able to see who these companies were. And there were all these buildings that you might have, you know, walked past before in your town and wondered, like, nobody's ever in that building. Like, it doesn't. What do they do? Like, is it a money laundering front? Like, how are they not out of business? And now you can cross reference for the first time and see, like, oh, that's what this company does. That's. That company built $100,000 a month to Medicaid. And once you know the significance of those companies and where they are, you can do things like look up their owners, you can go and see who created that, that LLC and look up who is this person. And that's kind of what led me to Columbus, Ohio.
- [07:44]
A
So I want to stop and I just want to really hone in or kind of take a minute and appreciate the fact that you sort of alluded to this before, right? Like these billboards and people, people drive by the billboards and maybe it's just that the wealthy white liberals don't, you know, don't, don't stop and ask. I think that, I think I. That's an element of this that I hadn't considered. Right. But to your point, it's, you know, any of us who live in like urban or have lived in urban or ex urban areas, there's always that one storefront, you know, like, there's always one spot that's like, you know, there's one place in my old neighborhood here in Northern Virginia that purports to be a place where you can buy concert tickets. Like a physical storefront that's like a third party concert ticket salesman in 2026. And I always, I would walk by it and be like, well, that can't be what that place is. But I never, you know, I never, I never looked into it. But you looked into it, which is what I was sort of getting at in the intro. That's the noticing is only half the battle and pointing something out is only half the battle. Then you have to dig into it. And that's what I want to get into now, which is. So there's this database. You go to Columbus, Ohio, you did a lot of, again, how you spent how many, what, four days there? A bunch of. You were on the ground for a bunch of days. We can go, we'll talk more about that in a minute. And that's all, you know, very featured in Luke's series. And again, I encourage everyone to go read it. He details, there's videos, you know, all sorts of interactions with people and they're all great. But I want to know about the. So you, you get the database, you go to Columbus, you've gathered all the information, and then you built your own system. Right. To analyze this data. Tell me everything about that. How does this work? What have you done?
- [09:26]
B
Yeah, I programmed basically a system that lets you type in anybody's name or any company name and then find out any Medicaid companies that they have and how the billing has changed over time, what they're billing for, how many clients they had, and then also run analytics, like the changes over time in various Sectors and the discrepancies in where they're based, and also, like, clustering of businesses altogether, like hotspots. And so one of the things that popped up is that there had been huge growth in certain Medicaid waiver programs. Waiver means it's not at the core of the Medicaid program. It's not what Congress intended when they created this thing. But various states petitioned them to go above and beyond and provide some sort of special service. And that's what Tim Walsh did in Minnesota that created this 12 Medicaid waiver programs, all of which were extraordinarily gullible and extraordinarily prone to fraud and wasted billions of dollars. Other states have gotten those waivers over the years, and one of them that's become very common is home health care to send nurses to the. At this point, most states, the vast majority, have these waivers. They use them to varying degrees. But pushing that further was sort of personal services, which is like, you don't need to be a nurse. You can just be like anybody and just go do, like, cooking and cleaning. And I think that right away became way more susceptible to fraud because you open the door to the family members doing it. You open the door to, like, sketchy people, like, in the underbelly of society. Whereas, at least if you had to be a nurse, you had to go to some sort of class, right? Yeah.
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A
Proximal barrier to entry.
- [11:14]
B
Yes. And you have a license on the line. And so the explosion in personal services led me to Columbus. And then at the same time, you had these. The street that was the epicenter of, like, there was, like, just hundreds of companies all in this one street. But this part is. Then there we had this sort of two things happening at once, this really serendipitous convergence where a great researcher by the name of Parker Thayer, who works for the Capital Research center, was doing some independent. Some separate research, and he landed on the same street, finding this one guy in particular that was super sketchy and then just going down quickly, seeing that the Medicaid. There was this whole ecosystem of Medicaid there. And so Parker found this foundation called the Unique foundation, which was getting government grants to help illegal immigrants who are in prison commit less crimes once they were released. So it was like a completely insane thing to pay this Somali guy all this money to help his illegal immigrant friends who are in prison stop being criminals, even though they're still going to be in our country. And the thing about this Somali who got the grant is he had, like, five other jobs. the same time, it's not like he's some sort of specialist in this whatever anti recidivism or whatever. Like he had a company that made software to manage like home healthcare companies. He had, I think like all these. It's been a while since I looked at it, so I don't want to get too specific and misstate it, but there were all these financial red flags in his background that made it kind of preposterous to think like this is a great idea. We should give this guy grants. So number one, Parker found that the street called East Dublin Granville Road had a lot of Somalis on it that had a lot of businesses each that were all billing the federal government. And it made it seem like they were not like dedicated. It wasn't like home healthcare was their chosen field and they had dedicated their lives to like healthcare and studied for it. And it was just literally like people would just be dabbling in like five industries at once. And the common denominator was pilfering the federal government. Like that was the only connection between all the various things they did is just like cash grab against the taxpayer.
- [13:48]
A
Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees. Get ahead of summer with custom window treatments like solar roller shades from blinds.com and save up to 45% off during the Memorial Day early Access sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you free samples, real design experts and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 45% off site wide or right now during the early Access Memorial day sale@blinds.com rules and restrictions apply. I have one more question about the coding thing just because I find it so fascinating. Like when, when, when did you learn how to do this? Because this is. People might not know this, but this is like Luke is. I don't understand how it works, but Luke is a great. He, he does. He's always doing some sort of computer trickery. It help, it helps. It helps our team a lot. He's always coding things. He does it with his own story. I think this is the, the most. I think maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like the most data that you've like processed with something that you coded usually. I mean, it's all very impressive, but it's, you know, you've done some cool stuff with plagiarism, checking that. That's, that's a super impressive one that we can talk about a later date. But like when Just like out of just on a biographical note, like when and when, when did you have time to learn how to do this in addition to doing all the other?
- [15:06]
B
I learned to code when I was 12 years old, so I had a lot of time back then. And it' I, it's fun and I like the feeling of it. Makes you almost like a God. When you're the programmer, you can make the computer do anything. Like there's no limits. Like you use your imagination. People are like, well, is it possible for a computer. Yes, it's possible for computer to do anything. You just have to, you can make it happen. You just, if you are the programmer, you are the architect. And so you can kind of just do anything, just bring things into existence using your imagination and just following basic logic. And so it's been doing it a long time. And then I found it to be very useful for journalism. And the easiest way to think of it, a lot of really what I do is comparing two lists together and you'll have two lists that are very long and if there's overlap between the lists, that shows something very interesting in politics. And but the lists are like super long, like thousands each. Nobody's going to go through manually. I mean, you could if you had an army of interns or you just had like a ton of time, but you want to find that needle in the haystack and computers can automate it. And so it's really like an obvious way in my opinion, to do investigative journalism. But on the people who have like tech skills tend to be on the left, just as most journalists tend to be on the left. Also, most people who are in technology are on the left. And so that's something that I've encouraged people in conservative journalism to do more of. And I've worked with groups of young journalists on the right to learn those skills. And so, yeah, I think this is a good example of that. A lot of information now when you're talking about information, you're really talking about data. And so it's important for journalists as people who are charged with sifting through information, to be able to work with government data and Certainly Medicaid being 15% of the federal budget. I mean, this is a great example of how that can pay off.
- [17:11]
A
It's also just so, I mean, I know you said that this was kind of the catalyst of it, but it's important to stress. I don't think we can stress enough how crucial these Doge inspired databases are. I years ago, in a different job, before I was in journalism and I was doing health. Health policy research. I needed to get. I forget exactly what. But some sort of Medicaid or Medicare, some sort of CMS data. And it should have been, you know, it was like recent. I'm making this up. But, you know, let's say this was 2018. It was like 2015, hospital billing or something, right? Like, not something arcane and not something old. And the only way to get it. So I had to pay CMS and they mailed me CD ROMs of data. Like, just like that. It didn't exist online. You had to buy it. They send it to you in this. Again, obviously a CD ROM is not. It's not like they sent me something to decrypt, but increasingly. Right. I mean, today, when everything is digital and everything is AI like, and that is. That is a. It's. It's not an insurmountable barrier to entry, but like, it's one of the ways that, you know, the bureaucracy, it's sort of like, makes it hard because again, there are some people who face with that page, right? Who don't. Who don't have 50 bucks to spend on a SIM, right? Like, you're just not gonna.
- [18:27]
B
Yeah, no, that's such a great example. I've spent so much money and time getting CD ROMs from the government in this decade.
- [18:38]
A
And I remember it was like, it didn't. Whatever. It was like the project didn't work. Like, the data didn't. So it's like, again, I had like institutional money, but that was like fun. It was a waste of 50 bucks and I had to wait six weeks in between the order when the package showed up. So it's like. It is. I mean, these things add up, right? The time, the opportunity cost.
- [18:57]
B
And like, we all know that. Obviously you can just put it on the. Literally. Literally would be cheaper to host it on a server than to buy the postage to send you a dvd. Like it. It openly doesn't make sense. They're doing it because either they're complete idiots or they don't want you to have the data and they're making it a barrier, as you said. Or it's a jobs program for bureaucrats
- [19:20]
A
and they would rather the federal government is. Sometimes it's all three.
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B
You know, Obama should have done this a long time ago. He was always bragging about open data. But this was huge credit to Doge. I was gonna say the thing you actually just mentioned that cms, like, charges companies. Like, it was like. Because people will criticize Doge and get all like, oh, and then they'll try to figure out, how can they criticize Doge. Maybe it's a violation of privacy. Maybe it's whatever ammo they think they have against them. Like, like you said, they were already, CMS was already releasing this data, but they were doing it in the most corrupt way. They were selling it to companies that would then resell it as brokers. They were selling it privately in the form of DVDs and CD ROMs. And this is just like, look, if we're going to give this to rich corporations, you should just be able to download it on the Internet. And I think that's a great move. There's still more to go. There's other facets of Medicaid and Medicare that haven't been released yet. But it's really important to give the Department of Health and Human Services credit for doing that. I think it's not political and it's something that it's about time and it's something that everybody should applaud them for.
- [20:37]
A
Yeah. And I mean, the apolitical thing is something that the vice president, who's been talking a lot about this since your stories dropped, and it's sort of really become something that his fraud committee task force is focusing on. He's been stressing like this is not a partisan issue. Like, it's, it's, this happens in every state. And, you know, to a certain extent, it's a little bit, it's a little inevitable. Right. He said in his speech the other day, speaking from the White House, he was like, you know, we're very generous country. Right. Medicaid is very generous program. It's hundreds of millions of dollars going out every day. Stuff is going to get missed. Stuff is going to get lost. Bad actors are going to take advantage of it. That doesn't mean, you know, the vice President was clear. Like, this doesn't mean that we should shut it down, but it means that we have to be vigilant. And the problem comes when states just ignore it. Just straight up ignore it. Or federal agencies make it hard for people who do want to look into it to, to access the data. But I want to speak. We'll close. We'll close with the vice president because as I've, as I've alluded to several times, he's, this is sort of fortuitous timing. He's getting very interested in this. You've given him a lot of ammo to work with. He's mentioned the Columbus stuff a lot since he's been discussing, you Know this fraud task force. You're no stranger to seeing your investigations pay off, seeing lawmakers talk about it, getting called to Washington to testify about it. But you have been going nonstop for the past week. Is this the most or at least the quickest that any of your stories have gotten traction like this?
- [22:06]
B
Yeah, I mean, it really is like catching lightning in a bottle. I haven't seen my, my kids in a long time. Chris credit thanks to my wife for really stepping up and like putting them to bed every day. It's been nonstop. But I think that there's an element of luck to all this when people pay attention. You know, you want to ride that wave and you want to just keep going with more follow ups. So that's what, what we've been doing. And I'm glad people are paying attention because I think when we were strategizing about this months ago, we were worried about is it a little wonky? Is it, you know, we're trying to basically save the government, save, save our kids from going into debt to China because the country's going to be bankrupt if we keep spending money like this. And there's, but it's a little in the weeds. It felt a little wonky and then luckily it wasn't perceived that way. I think maybe the visual element helps draw people in. You did have the videos that are kind of like the Nick Shirley stuff. And you know, I, of course I saw the Nick Shirley stuff. I liked it. I thought it was really important. People on the left then criticize and you alluded to this very well in your opening. You see the videos and they criticize the people on the left. They speculate. Well, is that, that's anecdotal. You had one guy in a daycare and he happened to be Somali or maybe it's not representative and 99 of daycares are legit. Or maybe Nick Shirley was picking on Somalis even though you could find any number of people who weren't Somalis doing this. And I think that's where the data was helpful in taking a step back and saying we're not looking for any one thing in particular. Let's. We're not starting with a conclusion. We're not starting with a company. We're focusing on just like, show me the lay of the land. And that was what's so wild when you see how it really, the Medicaid waiver programs really are concentrated in Somali communities. And then also just the names of these providers. Like, it's literally like, you know, in, in Columbus is overwhelmingly, like, almost entirely foreign names. And so I think the data is helpful to hopefully moving the narrative and. And helping people understand, like, you know, what. What you kind of saw with Nick Shirley. I mean, it really is. He's on to something here because this is bigger than any of us knew. And now next time when you walking down your. When you're driving down in your town and you see that building that nobody really seems to go to, and their business model doesn't seem to make any sense, now you're going to be able to find out, well, how many millions of dollars in Medicaid money did they get last year?
- [24:39]
A
So you mentioned before that you did some work with Parker Thayer from the Capital Research Center. Just say a little bit more about that relationship and what you guys sort of got into on the streets of Columbus.
- [24:51]
B
Yeah, it was super helpful. I mean, me and him kind of turned into a good team. And we were working with the data together, and we developed this whole lexicon where it's like we're looking into these people and it's very hard to track. This is part of why I think fraud happens in foreign communities. It's not, you know, only that they are. They may be more likely to commit fraud. It's also more difficult for the government to stop it because the names are so hard to track. You have Mohammed, Ahmed and Ahmed, Mohammed and Omar Omar. And so Parker and I spent months trying to figure out who are all these people. And we would have these hours, long discussions. Well, do you think Abdulkar Muhammad is the brother of Abdihim Muhammad or is it a different guy with the same name? Well, they both lived in the same address at one point, so they must be brothers. And so it was like this bizarre form of like, Sherlock Holmes detective, if Sherlock Holmes went to Somalia, you know, like trying to piece all the puzzles that put all the puzzle pieces together. And. And it was a bit. It was a bit lonely to be working for this long on something that nobody else would have any clue what you're talking about. But there was one other guy with me, Parker Thayer, a shout out to the Capital Research Center. They do a lot of great work like this in terms of just getting in the weeds and doing deep research and teaming up with the Daily Wire. It was awesome. And I feel a little bit like, you know, bonded to Parker because we went through some stuff together. We saw some weird stuff. He did then go to Columbus with me, and that was helpful. So we weren't just one. One person walking alone through all these sketchy places. But I feel bonded to Parker in the same way that I think fraternity brothers are bonded or people who go to war together are bonded because we've seen some. Some stuff together. And now I think, luckily, because of the videos and because of some of the pickup that the story has get in has gotten, people have some sense of what we went through. But it took a while to get over the finish line. It was a lot of research and a lot of painstaking work. And for a while, it was just like me and him were the only two people in the world that knew how insane it was on East Dublin Granville Road in Columbus. And so now the world knows about east, dubbed Dublin.
- [27:24]
A
Well, and I think this. You sort of alluded to this earlier, and I think this is an important thing to remember, too, right? Which is that if this were. If the New York Times were investigating this, if one of the mainstream, you know, outlets, right, there would be 25 people. They'd have 15 journalists and a team of researchers and interns and production assistants. They'd open a field office. They'd. They probably already have some sort of Midwestern bureau that they could work out of. It would be a whole production. Right? And I think that is something that, you know, people don't always consider, like, on our. Right, you know, we're. It's. It's a very. You know, we are small but mighty by comparison. It's just like, usually it's just you. This. The fact that this time having one other guy was such an important, like, thing. It's like, that's real. But that's also a testament to how often you and Parker, on the research side, like, so often on the conservative side of things, really is like lone wolves. It's just like one good. One person kind of doggedly following something and then eventually surfacing for air and kind of like alerting the world, like, hey, I found something that's such a great way to.
- [28:30]
B
I like. I love the way you phrase things. Even surfing for air. It really does feel like that. And that's. Yeah, it's such a good point. I mean, we've talked about the Daily Wire punching above its weight, and I think this is an example of that. But I never really considered the way you just said it, because it's exactly right. I mean, it's impressive when. When the Daily W Wire and other conservative outlets break big stories. But it's, I think, especially impressive the amount that. How much an outlet like the Daily Wire does, given the enormous magnitude the differential in resources between the New York Times, when they get a Pulitzer, it's because they have, of course they did. They, but they threw 100 bodies at a story and we're doing it with so much less.
- [29:10]
A
Yeah. And it's also just, I love, I always love using the New York Times as a comparison. So really? Because like they are, they are at a place that it's like impossible for any other outlet to catch up to. And I don't say that to denigrate like an outlet, outlet like ours. Like you know, hopefully one day, right. The Daily Wa, the Daily Wire will continue to scale up. But the New York Times is 200 years old and has been held by the same like American elite, wealthy family. Right. For so long. That's the, that's the thing. It's not a matter of scalability. It's like they're, you know, they're an American institution. And I just say that as an objective fact, not like a praiseworthy thing. It's, it's sort of, you know, it's like, I don't know, it's like, like you could be the most powerful financial institution in the world and you're never going to catch up to JP Morgan Chase just because they had a, they had a hundred year leg up on you. And they started with like, you know, the guy who was the best at this.
- [29:58]
B
Yeah. And that it kind of alludes to the question that some people have asked about this Medicaid scandal in Ohio, which is why didn't others find it first? You know, why didn't the Columbus Dispatch find it? Why didn't the New York Times with all of its research find it? And why didn't the, the administration of Governor Mike DeWine with all the contractors and government bureaucrats that are paid to find the misspending of money, find this? And that's one of the things that J.D. vance mentioned is they're actually going to counterintuitively, it sounds kind of counterintuitive, but they're going to take away some of their anti fraud money because they're like, well, why are we paying you? You guys didn't try to stop any fraud. Why did the federal government give you money specifically to find fraud in Medicaid? Because if a couple of guys with, with laptops and cell phones could find this and you didn't find it in 10 years, what are we paying for?
- [30:51]
A
Luke Rosiak is the Daily Wire's senior investigative reporter. His series Medicaid Millions is up now on daily wire.com Luke, thank you so much for taking us behind the story.
- [31:01]
B
Thanks, Tim.