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Ramaswamy vows aggressive Medicaid crackdown after report alleges millions billed from vacant Ohio offices
Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is calling for a sweeping crackdown on his state’s Medicaid program after a report alleged 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… deserve[s] 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 remarks came after a report by The Daily Wire that allegedly 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.
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Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s office disagreed with the notion of a broader systemic issue.
In a statement to Fox News, they insisted Ohio “has extensive oversight mechanisms in place,” noting that these include “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…”
His office also pointed to “internal agency efforts to fight waste, fraud and abuse.”
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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 insists 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 [Joe] 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.”
Ramaswamy said his approach would involve redirecting savings back to taxpayers, with the aim of creating a blueprint for reform nationwide.
Hollywood director Adam McKay unloaded on White liberals during an interview on Wednesday in a fiery critique of the Democratic Party.
“I could go on with a list of 400 things, the same party that kept healthcare private,” McKay told host Jesse Damiani during his “Urgent Futures” podcast after railing against prominent Democratic Party members. “That, you know, on and on and on. And it was like, we are being hit with the high grade marketing and no group is worse than White liberals.”
“I mean, they are the worst. I’ve tried to talk to them about climate. They are so smug and captured. And really, it boils down to privilege. I mean, when you talk to White money liberals, they’re getting a lot from this broken system. So at some point, I realized these are bad-faith arguments and conversations,” he said.
McKay said he couldn’t support a party that didn’t back universal healthcare.
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“You can’t support a party that doesn’t want universal healthcare. The Democrats don’t have that in their party platform. Kamala, Hillary never brought it up. If you were in like Norway or France or Australia. And you were like, we don’t need universal healthcare. People would be like, ‘You are a Nazi,'” he said.
McKay continued, “Like even the neo-Nazi parties in Europe don’t campaign against nationalized healthcare. So I think the U.S. is essentially an island country and no group of people has, you know, heads full of bees more than White liberals. Like, I’ve heard the craziest s— from White liberals.”
McKay argued that White liberals benefit from the system and only care about their class and social scene.
“I almost can say I despise American White liberals,” he said. “They are the grossest of the gross.”
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McKay announced in 2024, following President Donald Trump’s election victory, that he would be leaving the Democratic Party.
“It is time to abandon the Dem Party,” McKay wrote on X at the time. “I’m registering Green Party or Working Families. But am open to ideas.”
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The director ripped the Democratic Party for what he deemed a series of missteps leading up to Election Day, including how it handled former President Biden bowing out of the race to make way for former Vice President Kamala Harris on the ticket.
McKay has in recent years championed progressive causes and has donated millions of dollars to fight climate change. His activism has also bled into his work. His movie “Don’t Look Up,” for instance, served as a critique of a lack of action when it comes to protecting the environment. The 2021 satire film centered on two scientists who tried in vain to warn the world about a planet-destroying comet.
McKay claimed in December 2024 that “America has never been more right wing and propagandized,” after predicting that the film “Wicked” would eventually get canceled.
“On a pure storytelling level, ‘Wicked Part 1’ is right up there as one of the most radical big studio Hollywood movies ever made,” McKay posted on X.
Fox News’ Cortney O’Brien contributed to this report.
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