From Fox News: On the heels of Minnesota’s still-unfolding massive social services fraud scandal, a whistleblower is exposing a similar scheme occurring among the Ohio Somali community, which she says dates back over a decade and totals millions in stolen taxpayer dollars.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Mehek Cooke, an Ohio attorney and conservative commentator, said that “Minnesota was just the tip of the spear.”
She said that providers within the Ohio Somali community have confided to her that they have been pressured to join in a “massive” Medicaid fraud scheme that involves doctors “rubber stamping” home healthcare payouts to the family members of elderly individuals for fake medical conditions.
Cooke explained that Ohio’s Medicaid program allows individuals to receive Medicaid payments for care they are providing to a family member. People can make up to $91,000 per year, per individual.
The scheme exploiting the program involves doctors who approve these payments in order to get kickbacks, according to Cooke.
“Say I want to take care of my elderly aging parents at some point. I can become a home health provider, and this is where the Somali community has been really clever. They’ve been able to find loopholes in Ohio law to provide for care for family members, even when they don’t need it,” Cooke explained.
The doctors are “just rubber-stamping a lot of these,” Cooke claimed. “And then that same individual, a week later, that’s supposed to be bedridden, is all over social media, whether they’re out dancing at a party or something like that. So, the symptoms aren’t really adding up at the end of the day.”
Cooke doesn’t place blame on the entire Somalian community, merely “the criminals within the Somalian community that have exploited Ohio’s Medicaid program because we have a system right now that’s one of the easiest in the Midwest to game.”
Read more at Fox News
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