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FIRST ON FOX: 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 health care payouts to the family members of elderly individuals for fake medical conditions.
She explained that scammers in the community have been exploiting a loophole in Ohio’s Medicaid program that allows individuals to receive Medicaid payments, totaling as much as $91,000 per year per individual, for care they are supposedly providing to a family member. Doctors who approve these payments in turn receive kickbacks themselves, according to Cooke.
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Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke is blowing the whistle on what she is calling rampant fraud and abuse in the Ohio Medicaid program on the heels of the massive fraud scheme in Minnesota. (Photo courtesy of Mehek Cooke)
“They’re just rubberstamping a lot of these. 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 noted that she believes that “the problem today is not the community; it’s actually 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.”
“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.
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The Ohio Statehouse (Getty Images)
She said that the providers who came to her divulged this information at great personal risk, telling her that if they were exposed, they would be “stoned to death.”
“We have entrusted states to look at the funding and to allocate it to build programs, to build rules and regulations. But unfortunately, in states like Ohio, it is being infiltrated and broken down because you don’t actually have independent assessments with not only doctors but somebody at the Department of Medicaid coming in. There’s not random visits that are happening all the time,” she said. “So, a lot of times what’s happening is an individual is coached to lie to a doctor.”
Cooke said that, according to providers within the community, 99 percent of the time individuals receiving the home health care Medicaid benefit have been coached and do not actually qualify for the benefit.
“What we’re seeing in Minneapolis is just a snippet of what’s happening in Ohio,” she said.
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Columbus, Ohio, skyline at night. (Matt Kazmierski via Getty Images)
“I know that everybody wants to make this a Somali issue or a race issue. It’s not. Our waiver system in Ohio was built with compassion. It was built to really help individuals that are struggling and in need, but it’s being looted today,” Cooke went on.
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“I think every state, in addition to Ohio, should be asking for audits of their Medicaid system and their programs,” she said, adding, “At the end of the day, Ohio taxpayers are hurting, the American people are hurting, and we don’t have enough tax dollars.”
