Testimony of Luke Rosiak, The Daily Wire, on Medicaid Home Health Waiver Programs — May 20, 2026

Summary

Testimony of Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter for The Daily Wire, addressed to Senator Ernst, Senator Markey and committee members, dated 2026-05-20 in the page record. The testimony describes The Daily Wire's investigation into Medicaid home health waiver programs using a database released by the Department of Health and Human Services in February. It states that Ohio's Medicaid spends a billion dollars a year on home health care and that one building housed 94 Medicaid companies that billed more than $66 million, and it describes four companies the reporter examined. The testimony closes with proposed policy changes, including rolling release of Medicaid spending data, amending the 21st Century Cures Act on Electronic Visit Verification, and terminating personal services waivers, followed by a biography of the witness.

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Luke Rosiak, Investigative Reporter, The Daily Wire

Thank you Senator Ernst, Senator Markey, committee members. It's an honor to join you to
discuss The Daily Wire’s investigation into Medicaid home health waiver programs.

In February, the Department of Health and Human Services released a database showing which
corporations had been paid by Medicaid. Medicaid is 15% of the federal budget, but previously
we had no idea where it went. Where there’s no transparency, bad things can happen.

Medicaid originally granted states waivers for in-home health care on the theory that sending
nurses to people’s houses was cheaper than a nursing home. Then the federal government
permitted some states to have waivers adding what’s called “personal services,” where people
without a medical license bill hourly for “chores” like cooking and cleaning in private residences.

Many of these aides are actually the family members of the people receiving services, and they
can even bill for tasks like “conversation & companionship.” So people are in some cases
getting paid to hang out with their own families, or for doing things they’d hopefully do anyway,
out of love.

Spending in this category has exploded in the last few years to the point where policymakers
must reevaluate it. Home health care aide is now the most common job in New York state.
California reported gaining jobs recently, but if you subtract the home health care aides, it
actually lost jobs. This is a seismic shift, and Congress never voted to make this happen.

The original justification – that this saved money compared to nursing homes – doesn’t hold
water. It turns out that way more people claim to be sick when it means they can get a paycheck
for their family member.

The program is highly susceptible to fraud because the government is paying invoices for things
that happen between family members inside private residences. Is a mother going to tattle on
her son if he doesn’t perform a task he billed for? In other cases, a personal services aide will
have multiple clients who aren’t their relatives. This is vulnerable to kickbacks schemes.

Ohio’s Medicaid alone spends a billion dollars a year on home health care. More money was
spent on “personal services” than any medical billing code for which data is available. The data
shows extreme abnormalities. 15% of all home health care in the state of Ohio took place in a
four-square-mile area in northeast Columbus.

When you drive down the street there, it seems like most businesses have closed down and
been replaced by home health companies. These are middlemen that have the NPI number
necessary to bill Medicaid, then pay the people who are at home with their families, while
keeping a cut. Some, based out of tiny, empty offices in run-down strip malls, bill the
government as much as $1 million a month.
I first noticed that something was odd, actually, because of SBA loans. Many of the people
running these companies weren’t people who had dedicated their careers to healthcare. They
had numerous different businesses in different industries. They might get an SBA loan for a
business such as a grocery store, default on the loan, open another business like trucking and
get PPP loans, and then be running this Medicaid business on the side.

One building had 94 Medicaid companies that billed more than $66 million over the last few
years. One landlord owned seven other buildings in the area that have 300 Medicaid companies
billing more than a quarter billion dollars.

When I went to the buildings, almost all the offices were empty. They had signs saying
employees had stepped out to lunch, even though mail piling up showed they hadn’t been there
in months. Because of the new HHS dataset, the public could, for the first time, do basic
research on who was billing all this money. It didn’t seem like anyone from the government had
tried.

One, True Home Healthcare LLC, is owned by Alieu Conteh and his wife Mamusu Kanu. Conteh
is a career criminal with numerous convictions for fraud and child endangerment. Conteh told
me he was quote, “just too dumb to know what is law.” His wife was convicted of theft three
times in three years. After she was arrested for felony malicious wounding in Virginia and they
were evicted for being broke, they moved to Ohio to get into the Medicaid business.

The nursing board permanently barred the husband from working as a nurse in home health or
managing money. But Medicaid authorized him to start his own business doing exactly that. It’s
billed Medicaid as much as $100,000 a month. When I asked Alieu Conteh some basic
questions, he threatened my family.

A second company, Omega Healthcare Services, was incorporated by Esther Acheampong right
after she had a daycare shut down because it couldn’t produce evidence that kids were actually
attending. The home health firm used the address of a company belonging to her husband, a
repeat felon who had pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government by billing for
nonexistent elder services.

Omega’s incorporation paperwork listed Esther’s name along with the name of a teenager who
lived hours away. The teenager was the son of a man who just got out of prison for money
laundering and tax evasion. Medicaid has paid this so-called home health company $6 million,
with checks continuing to go out this month, even as the husband has claimed he’s too poor to
pay restitution in his own federal theft case.

A third company was founded by Mohamed Jama while he was in college. He went on to work
full-time as an engineer, but when he was fired, he boasted that it was no hardship: On top of
raising nine kids and having a full-time job, he had a secret side gig that was raking in massive
sums from the government. He sold the business and ran for state Senate. The business has
billed Medicaid $11 million, but it seemed to come so easily that it didn’t even get a mention in
his campaign biography. His campaign was funded largely by donations from other people who
owned Medicaid companies.

A fourth example is a janitor who changed the name of her janitorial LLC to “One Community
Mental Health,” then billed the government $100,000 in the first month. It later billed up to
$650,000 a month. Meanwhile she started a daycare and an addiction treatment center. Then
she left the country.

Walk down the halls of any of these Medicaid buildings and throw a rock, and you’ll find a story
like this. I found these examples, and many more, working as a two-person team alongside
Parker Thayer from the Capital Research Center. Hundreds of people have been paid by the
government for years to make sure this program isn’t being abused. This shows a complete
failure.

I have some ideas for policy fixes that I would be happy to discuss along with any other
questions you may have.




Policy fixes:

   ●​ Congress should require HHS to release comprehensive Medicaid spending data on a
      rolling basis
   ●​ The HHS provider database, an existing database of doctors, should publicly disclose
      how many expensive Medicaid treatments each doctor has authorized in a given time
      period
   ●​ The 21st Century Cures Act should be amended to make Electronic Visit Verification
      requirements more specific, preventing states from avoiding key components like GPS,
      or implementing them in ways that are easily falsified
   ●​ To ensure a consistent standard of review, only a panel of government doctors should be
      allowed to deem someone in need of Medicaid home health care (like for veterans) and
      they should operate within a budget that requires them to prioritize the most severe
      cases
   ●​ The Department of Health and Human Services should terminate “personal services”
      waivers with states



Bio:
Luke Rosiak is an investigative reporter for The Daily Wire who has covered waste in the federal
government for nearly 20 years. He is a database expert who uses computer programming to
analyze government records. He is the winner of the 2025 Dao Prize for Best Reporting on
Government Waste and the 2022 Media Research Center Bulldog Award for Outstanding
Investigative Journalism. He lives on a hobby goat farm in Virginia.

His stories on Medicaid home health include:

   ●​ Part 1: How The Feds Pay Immigrants Billions To Hang Out With Their Families
   ●​ Part 2: Inside Ohio's Home Health Empire: 7 Buildings, 288 Medicaid Companies, $250
      Million
   ●​ Part 3: Meet The Convicted Fraudster Running A Million Dollar Medicaid Business
   ●​ Ohio Says Safeguards Exist To Stop Medicaid Fraud, But Inserted Massive Loophole
   ●​ Part 4: He Was Convicted For Defrauding The Government. Now Medicaid Pays His
      Wife Millions.


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