Ramaswamy Calls for Crackdown on Ohio Medicaid after Report on Billing from Vacant Offices

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called for a sweeping crackdown on the state's Medicaid program following a report that companies billed millions of taxpayer dollars from vacant offices, including abandoned buildings with piled-up mail, "out to lunch" signs and no visible staff.

"We're going to have to take a deep, hard look at the way the $40-plus billion in state Medicaid dollars are being spent," Ramaswamy told Saturday in America host Kayleigh McEnany.

"I think the right answer is any instance of waste, fraud, abuse deserves to be prosecuted, and we intend to investigate them aggressively, as well as to prosecute aggressively, to send a deterrent signal that our government is not a piggy bank, the taxpayer is not a piggy bank to be bilked."

The comments followed a Daily Wire report that found 288 home healthcare companies listed at the same addresses, including locations that appeared vacant or in disrepair, with no clear signs of active business operations.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine's office rejected the idea of a broader systemic issue. In a statement to Fox News, it said Ohio "has extensive oversight mechanisms in place," including "Electronic Visit Verification for hourly care, requiring signed daily activity logs, conducting audits and surveys performing background checks on providers, and reassessing medical needs regularly."

The office also cited "internal agency efforts to fight waste, fraud and abuse."

The Ohio Department of Medicaid said in a statement that it is "aware" of the concerns in Franklin County, which houses Columbus, and has been "actively investigating these matters since prior to the publication of The Daily Wire series."

"Upon initial review, some of the entities mentioned in the series are no longer Ohio Medicaid providers or have not billed Medicaid in several years. Some other providers are subject to ongoing investigation," the statement added.

Ramaswamy said the state has to "look at" where the concern came from.

"These are downstream policies of an overgrown federal welfare state. That's a big problem," he said.

"We as a country are going to have to deal with it. They're downstream of an open border crisis under Biden where for years millions and millions of people were 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 that I intend to do is to just take a dispassionate look at this. It's not just responding to one news story or another as a game of whack-a-mole. The way I look at this is this is more of a broken windows theory, which means that, if you have a broken window somewhere, it's a reminder that we have to take a systematic look at the whole thing."