Ohio, home to the country’s second-largest Somali population, has a multibillion-dollar Somali fraud crisis similar to the scandal in Minnesota, members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform warned this week.
“Recent reporting shows that many of the Somali and Bhutanese communities commit a large portion, if not the majority, of home health Medicaid fraud in Ohio,” said Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), chairman of the House oversight committee’s task force on exposing institutional abuses, at a hearing on Wednesday examining fraud in Ohio’s Medicaid program.
An investigative series by the Daily Wire recently reported that sham home healthcare companies, primarily operated by immigrants from Somalia and Bhutan, are billing Medicaid for services never actually rendered. Such billing schemes exploiting vulnerabilities in Ohio’s Medicaid system are estimated to have stolen more than $1.2 billion from the federal government in recent years.
Gill asked Luke Rosiak, the Daily Wire reporter who identified numerous individuals and agencies in Ohio that he believes have committed Medicaid fraud, how many of those entities or operators had Bhutanese, Somali, or otherwise African-origin names.
Rosiak said “100%” of the hundreds he had investigated appeared to be foreign-sounding.
Gill questioned whether Rosiak found any connections between fraud rings based in Ohio and Minnesota. “It’s the same people,” Rosiak said. “They all have relatives in both places, and they move back and forth.”
Rosiak testified about scammers funneling $130 million in cash, stuffed inside briefcases, out of the Columbus airport to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, before the money was sent off to Somalia.
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“Your testimony is that there is a large, interstate criminal enterprise of Somali fraudsters that are defrauding the federal government in multiple states [out of] potentially billions of dollars,” Gill said.
Rosiak affirmed, noting that scammers from the South Asian nation of Bhutan are also orchestrating the fraud.
“So it’s not just the Somalis. It’s also Bhutanese,” Gill added. “It’s across multiple states. They’re coordinating with each other. There’s a network of foreigners running criminal fraud rings within our country defrauding our federal government.”
Gill pointed to lax immigration policies as the reason why fraud has proliferated in sanctuary states such as Ohio and Minnesota. Columbus has one of the largest Somali communities in the country, second to Minneapolis, with 60,000 residents of Somali descent living in Ohio’s capital city.
“This is the tip of the iceberg of the gross abuse of America’s immigration system,” Gill said. “For too long, our government has allowed foreigners from low-trust societies with very little vetting to pour into our communities.”
Ohio state Sen. Nickie Antonio, the House Democrats’ witness and a Democratic lawmaker herself, responded to Gill’s exchange with Rosiak by saying she was “almost brought to tears” by the “level of hateful rhetoric.”
“It’s shocking to me the lack of even humanity to group people together,” Antonio said. “I am shocked and appalled by the behavior here right now.”
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Gill asked Antonio, “Has Somali immigration been good for Ohio?”
“In every community, there are good people and bad people,” Antonio argued. “But to try to say that every single member of a group is somehow a criminal is shocking to me.”
Gill interjected, while other panel members scolded him for talking over Antonio as she spoke, before he abruptly adjourned the meeting, the task force’s first since its formation in May.
