NEWNow you can listen to Fox News articles!
Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is calling for the Medicaid program to be dismantled in his state after a report said companies billed millions of taxpayer dollars for vacant offices, including abandoned buildings with piles of mail, “lunch” signs and no employees in sight.
“We’re going to have to take a hard, hard look at how the 40 billion Medicaid dollars are being spent,” Ramaswamy told “Saturday in America” host Kayleigh McEnany.
“I think the right answer is any incident of waste, fraud, abuse… it should[s] for them to be prosecuted, and we intend to investigate them hard, and prosecute them hard, to send a deterrent signal that our government is not a piggy bank, the taxpayer is not a piggy bank to be bailed out.”
He said this after a report by the Daily Wire which allegedly found 288 health companies listed at the same addresses, including places that seemed to be empty or in bad condition, with no clear signs that the businesses are working.
GOP LEGISLATION MOVES TO BAR WELFARE RECIPIENTS FROM SENDING MONEY ABROAD: ‘THE ABUSE ENDS NOW’
Vivek Ramaswamy appears to speak at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025 in Phoenix on Dec. 19, 2025. (Jon Cherry/AP)
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s office disagrees with the idea of a system-wide problem.
In a statement sent to Fox News, they emphasized that Ohio has “comprehensive oversight mechanisms,” noting that these include “Electronic Visit Verification for round-the-clock care, requiring signed daily activity logs, conducting background checks and screenings on providers, and regularly re-evaluating medical needs…”
His office also pointed to “internal agency efforts to combat waste, fraud and abuse.”
GOP SENATOR INTRODUCES EFFORTS TO CLOSE MEDICAID LOOPHOLE THAT ALLOWS MILLIONS OF FRAUDSTERS.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine takes a group photo with the Ohio Congressional delegation after the swearing-in ceremony of Sen. Jon Husted at the Old Senate House in the Capitol on Jan. 21, 2025. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc)
The Ohio Department of Medicaid said in a statement that it is “aware” of the concerns of Franklin County, which is home to Columbus, and has been “investigating these issues since before the publication of the Daily Wire series.”
“In the initial review, some of the entities mentioned in this series are no longer Ohio Medicaid providers or have not billed Medicaid in several years. Some other providers are under ongoing investigation,” the statement added.
Ramaswamy insists that the state should “look” where the concerns are coming from.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS PROGRAM
“These are policies downstream of the state’s overgrown welfare state. That’s a big problem,” he said.
“We as a country will have to deal with it. They are under the problem of open borders under it [Joe] Biden when millions and millions of people are already crossing the southern border and finding their way to different parts of the country,” he added.
“We can’t fix the past. We can fix the future, and one of the things I intend to do is just look at this dispassionately. It’s not just responding to one news story or another like a game of whack-a-mole. The way I look at this is more of a broken windows theory, which is, if you have a broken window to look at something somewhere, we have a perfect reminder somewhere.”
Ramaswamy said his approach would involve returning the savings back to taxpayers, with the aim of creating a framework for reform across the country.
