Transcript
Ben Shapiro (0:00)
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Billions of dollars of Medicaid stolen from you, the taxpayer. We've seen the quality leering sensors and the suspect behavior of thousands taking advantage of state level programs. This is massive fraud that we're uncovering on the federal scale. Canadian conservatives have always stood by the notion that government screws things up. Democrats build systems where waste, fraud and abuse, that's the feature, not the bug. They love stealing money from some and giving it to others. All to make people more dependent on the government more broadly while blaming the free markets. It's disgusting and it has to end. We'll get into all the receipts in a moment. And speaking of disgusting, Tucker Carlson just did a crazy interview with the New York Times that proves once and for all he is not remotely on the right. And in fact, he now stands with the worst enemies of American ideals. Apparently, there's no daylight between these would be revolutionaries, Tucker Carlson, Bernie Sanders and Hassan Piker. Welcome back to the Ben Shapiro Show. Well, Daily Wire exists to bring you the truth. We do that in a lot of ways. Got our commentary, our documentaries, our films, and not least with our investigative reporting. So this week we have a series of bombshell reports. After our reporters spent two months investigating the extent of welfare fraud in Ohio, where billions of dollars have now gone missing down the rat hole of government entitlement programs under the guise of home health care, our goal at the Daily Wire is to smash the supposedly untouchable pillars of the welfare state. It's time to return to true conservatism. Truth is the only way to get there. So fraud isn't just happening in the blue cities where you might expect. It's happening right under the nose of Republican governors. To, to in Ohio, for example, think one address 93 companies, no windows, totally empty, billed to you, The American taxpayer, $66 million over the last several years. Shell companies, fake billing, fake services, covered tracks until this very instant. So Daily Wire has now uncovered, via Luke Rosiak and our investigative team, Medicaid millionaires in a piece titled Medicaid Millionaires, how the feds pay immigrants Billions to hang out with their own families. Luke points out, quote, under the guise of health care, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid recipients homes to perform homemaking and chores like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these personal services tasks don't have to be health care workers. In 2024, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home health care. So they literally pay people Medicaid money to go to other people's houses to perform homemaking and chores. And as Luke writes, the new welfare queens aren't the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. They're the companies getting rich off of them. His Overall impression at 99% of the facilities I visited had the hallmarks of waste, fraud or abuse. We are talking about alleged criminality at a breathtaking scale. So for example, this here is a picture of 93 offices in Columbus, Ohio. It is 6161 Bush Blvd. So as you can see, all the windows are covered, which is weird. Typically, you know, if you have an office, you like to have windows because people like there to be some light in their offices. Why would you cover all the windows? Well, because there's nothing there. According to Luke, what's inside is 93 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in Home Health llc. And sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break. And again, this building, this address, build taxpayers over $66 million over the last several years. And as Luke points out, if you try to track down what exactly is happening in any one of these home health care companies, what you will find is an endless rabbit hole. He says you'll find years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they are making from Medicaid are just a side gig. The government is not and cannot be monitoring the people to whom they write million dollar checks. They all share combinations of just a few names, like Ahmed Mohammed and Mohammed Ahmed. And the population of Columbus, Ohio, it's the second biggest Somali population outside of Minnesota. They spell their own name multiple different ways within a single document. Many of them have their birthdays listed as January 1st because we don't know when they were born. Pretty much all of them, according to Luke, are registered voters. Wait for it. Wait for it. For the Democratic Party. Not a shock. So the business model is apparently simple. A 40 year old Somali gets paid for spending time with and maybe cooking for his own 65 year old mom. Sitting in the middle is one of these thousands of home health firms that have an NPI number necessary to build Medicaid. And then the 40 year old becomes an employee of that company, but the only patient is mom. There's no way to verify whether he's providing services unless his mom is willing to rat him out. Maybe he even gives a portion of the pay to mommy as a kickback for allowing her Social Security number to be used virtually. Apparently all of these home health care companies are owned by foreigners. As Luke writes, when we asked what home health care companies did, one man threatened journalists. Who cares? You guys pay my bills. Going to tell everybody you guys are racist. Yeah, there it is. Isn't that nice? See, this is the way the magic works. Defraud our Medicaid systems, defraud federal taxpayer dollars, and then when somebody comes knocking on the door, you just claim that they are a racist. Now, as Luke points Out. This poverty program is different from others, like food stamps, because it doesn't have a monetary cap. Its extent is not decided by politicians, but by any doctor willing to sign a form saying you can, you could use some help around the home. And one doctor can sign a billion of these forms. You bankrupt the state this way. Again, this is just part one of our series. What's coming tomorrow is so much worse, so much worse. I mean, already we're talking $66 million in potential fraud right here from 93 companies at one address, industrial scale. Alleged fraud happening right here. So how do we get this information? Well, there was a quiet Doge document drop in February of this year. So again, people were ripping on Elon Musk over doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency. Well, they had a lot of after effects, Doge, and one of the things they did is they revealed information into the public that allows journalists like Luke and our team, our investigative journalists here at Daily Wire, which have been building for a couple of years, to go out and actually dig in. Luke was able to dive in thanks to those DOGE documents. For decades, Medicaid billing data was a black box. It's one of the biggest government programs in, in human history. The public could not see a dime of it. And DOGE changed all of that in February with a quiet data release that a lot of people missed. Well, again, this week, we are going to reveal a lot more about what's going on in Ohio. We'll talk about one landlord who owned buildings with 300 different Medicaid companies that build the federal government $250 million. I mean, this kind of fraud has consequences. And again, it is a feature, not a bug. You'd imagine that there'd be Democrats out there who are upset with this kind of fraud. After all, if you're an advocate for a government program, you should want every dollar of that taxpayer money to go to someone who deserves the taxpayer money. But that's not what's happening. Democrats are irritated by the fact that people are uncovering this stuff. Now, the good news is Ohio is Republican governed. Mike DeWine is the governor of Ohio. Vivek Ramaswamy is very likely to be the next governor of Ohio. And President Trump is on top of this. And Vice President Vance is heading up the waste, fraud and abuse policing here. So we are very hopeful that there will be action here. And that's what we need. That's what we need. We need you to get involved. Share that story from daily wire.com it's not paywalled we need to help spread the word and hold people who are defrauding the American people to account. We need government hearings. We need prosecutions, we need doors kicked down. We need investigations. And again, Republican governors, federal officials need to fix this. That is what we are working on. That is what we are calling for. Because true change can be effectuated here by criminal justice. And this is a unique time to do it. The Trump administration has made policing, waste, fraud and abuse possible. This was not going to happen under Democrats. It can happen under Republicans. But people need to know about this story and they need to get that out there. So head on over to DailyWire.com and help spread that story and be part of the movement that ends welfare fraud in the country. Coming up, Spirit Airlines is now a ghost. And guess what? People are blaming capitalism rather than government. They're getting it wrong. Plus, Tucker Carlson does a very, very long interview with the New York Times and there's something wrong. We'll get to it. 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So over the weekend, Spirit Airlines finally gave up the ghost. Spirit had entered bankruptcy in August of last year for the second time in a year. And its executives, according to the Wall Street Journal, developed a game plan, Dub plan Charlie, in case the company's fortunes could not be turned around. So they tried to negotiate with the federal government. They were hoping for a $500 million government bailout to the tune of 90 government ownership in Spirit Airlines. Okay, I'm just telling you, you know what? I don't need to own, you know, you don't need to own, you know, taxpayers don't need to own Spirit Airlines. That is not the way that failing companies should be bailed out. In fact, when companies fail, when they are falling down, when what should happen is that they find another private buyer, they either go bankrupt, they run it into the ground, or they merge or they seek outside funding. Because again, when it comes to the risk taking that is necessary in private industry, the next step of failure is you have to go out and you have to demonstrate a turnaround plan. You have to show somebody else that you are willing to make serious changes, and then you can bring in new capital or maybe you can merge. The problem, of course, is Democrats are responsible for the death of Spirit airlines because Spirit Airlines tried to merge with JetBlue last year and Democrats stopped it. Now Spirit is trying to blame the jet fuel prices for its bankruptcy. They're trying to declare that the war in Iran is what the real problem was. But that wasn't the real problem because again, the other airline companies are not going bankrupt. Right now, Spirit was running a non solid footing. Again, Spirit was famous for very, very cheap airline fares. But now what's happened is competition has actually made airline travel better. I know there are a lot of people right now who are ripping on the airlines. I get it. I travel a lot. I traveled to coach out to L. A yesterday, and I got to say it wasn't the best. And I was flying JetBlue. But one thing that's happened, for example, is JetBlue provides free Internet. So it used to be, and still is on some of the airlines that they make you pay for the Internet. And now it seems that more and more airliners are going to move toward the free model. Competition and more competition in this area leads to better results. Well, Jetblue was trying to buy Spirit. They were trying to merge with Spirit. That was blocked by Democrats because Democrats have a theory. And that theory is if business gets bigger, that is inherently bad. So there are two theories of antitrust. Okay? Antitrust is the idea that you can't have a monopoly dominating a market because then it can, it can set prices wherever it wants. So if you had a grocery store monopoly in your neighborhood, theoretically they could set the price twice what it normally would be because you don't have any other choices. Now, true monopoly is incredibly rare in the market because if the prices tend to skyrocket, somebody else wants to get in on that action, they open up a grocery store across the street. Typically, true monopoly requires government intervention on behalf of the of the monopoly. But there's a second theory of antitrust that is not about the consumer at all. The first theory of antitrust says you should only police for monopoly when the consumer is harmed. And then there's a second theory of antitrust, the Democrat theory, which is if something is big, it is bad. That is the theory pursued by Senator Elizabeth Warren. So Elizabeth Warren is now blaming President Trump for Spirit's bankruptcy. She put out a tweet saying spiking fuel prices from Trump's war was the nail in the coffin for twice bankrupted Spirit Airline. For what it's worth, JetBlue merger failed because a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan said the deal was illegal. Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher cost hitting families. But that's not true. The reality is that there is a block by the Biden administration on the merger between JetBlue and Spirit. In fact, here she was tweeting back in March of 2024 triumphantly that the JetBlue Spirit merger had been ended. Quote, I've warned for months that a JetBlue Spirit Airlines merger was have led to fewer flights and higher fares. The Justice Department and the Department of Transportation were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation. This is a Biden win for Flyers. So do you feel like you're winning now there are fewer flights available? Do you feel like you are winning? By the way, the ex Secretary of Transportation, a man who really, really loves choo choo trains, Pete Buttigieg, who for some reason is considered an elite Democratic contender for the presidency after legitimately running the trail trains off the rails during his tenure at the Department of Transportation. Here is Pete Buttigieg in March 2024 talking about why they blocked the merger that would have saved Spirit.
