Joelle Cannon joins Elijah Haahr

From the spacious KWTO studios, it's the Elijah Harshow, 93am 560 KWTO. Welcome back to KWTL, one hour down, one hour to go. In case you haven't heard, Eric Erickson here in the studios today. Come by KWTL, have a beer, and meet Eric. But meanwhile, we're going to do shots fired with Joelle, K&N, Joel. Welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. We're going to, usually I do question of the day. We're going to do it at the end of the segment instead of the beginning because you've got a lot to talk about on fraud. Yeah, it's a big week on fraud. A lot has come out and a lot more is coming. There's a new report out called Medicaid Millionaires. An enterprising investigative journalist named Luke Roziak, he works at the Daily Wire, decided to take advantage of his right as an investigative reporter and a citizen, and he looked at a bunch of open information that Doge had released. related to Medicaid recipients now just as a reminder Medicaid is the program that provides health care for poor people low and disadvantaged people and 70 million Americans are on it. We spent $600 billion a year on Medicaid. However, the data, this in Luke looked at all the data and saw a lot of like 94 companies at one address. The names, none of them were American. This is just like Minnesota. This is Minnesota 2.0. So he has spent months working on this. So all... If you look online, all of these are, quote, Medicaid-approved providers. Medicaid providers. Their names are like Ahmed Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed, Omar, Omar, Omar. Omar. Ahmed, like it's the same 18 names repeated. When you click into their information, some of them, many of them have listed their birthday as January 1 because obviously it's like not a real person. So he looked at all of these. He decided to pick Ohio. I'm guessing. That was going to be my question. If Ohio is Minnesota 2.0, this is probably replicated in... Dozens of states. Well, I actually looked at this online. Okay, so Ohio has about 12 million people. And there are, what, 350 million people in America. So it's like whatever Ohio is, whatever they're wasting on Medicaid fraud in Ohio, if you multiply it by 30, that's probably what you're looking at, like 30%. That's what you'd be looking at for the country. Now.

Improper payments, we have numbers on this. This is money that goes to dead people, overpayments, underpayments. The Medicaid program has about $31 billion a year in improper payments. Unclear if these examples fall into that. But here's the deal. He looks at this information that's online. He picks Ohio as a target. Maybe because JD Vance is from there. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to do a lot of sort of reorganization. government efficiency stuff. I'm not sure why he picked Ohio. But he goes there. They have a very large Somalian population, which may be part of the reason. And he looks at these addresses and he starts going to these buildings. So examples, 94, quote, home health companies. that exist in one big empty building and they build for $66 million. But the building is empty. There's like Post-it notes that have, you know, gone for lunch, but there's dust on them. There's piles of mail. Yeah, gone fishing for the day. But here's the thing. Ohio, this may be another reason he chose Ohio. Ohio was a state that took the opportunity during COVID to pass Medicaid. expansion, Medicaid waivers. So they started expanding eligibility for the program. So now you're not just having to be a medical provider. You can provide, quote, personal services. So you don't have to be a health official. You don't have to be a nurse, but you can just check the box. You can bill them for companionship, cleaning. you know, lawn care, going to somebody's house and changing out, like cleaning the, cleaning the kitchen. Your own personal maids and butlers. Right. And so, you know, dozens and dozens, hundreds of essentially shell companies that are stood up by these foreign individuals, mostly with Arabic sounding names, and they're billing, you know, they're billing Medicaid. to the tune of like a billion dollars in Ohio. It's really interesting because you bring up that, again, it's Somalian focused in Ohio, just like it was in Minnesota. And one of the things that they talked about a lot of Minnesota is how a lot of that money gets laundered back to their home country. And then to, there's essentially, there's like a Somalian mafia essentially that is engaging mules to go across to America and go get that money. Go get that bag. Yeah, so he says it's a five-part series. He's put out two of the five parts. So we'll see what else he comes up with. But a lot of these buildings that he went to, there are just, you know, enormous buildings on the side of the road with no windows. One example, he found a woman who basically reinvary, she had a janitorial, janitorial company, reinvents herself as a health care provider and charges Medicaid $100,000 in the first month. Okay, so I've got, I got to ask, we said he did this, he went and found the data in Ohio. Is that data findable in every state? Yeah, so this data is available everywhere. There's actually a link online. I could post it. Doge, one of the things that they did was sort of data dump publicly available information. There is a link at the top of his report, and you can click on it, and it has all of the Medicaid recipients like Medicaid providers. And I.

It shows you how to search it. And I have not tried yet. But 100%, you can put in like Springfield, Missouri, and you can just start looking. And you can just start driving around and figure it out. And I mean, that's one of those cool things about today. We've essentially made everybody in America a journalist. They can all go. They can all find this information out. And if you have the time and the wherewithal, go find out who's defrauding the state. That'd be great. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the problems with waste, fraud, and abuse. Like this guy, I assume he has a college degree. I don't know how old he is. I think we actually tried to hire him one time when I was working there as an investigator. But, you know, he doesn't work for a member of Congress. You know, a member of Congress who serves on a committee that makes the rules that govern these programs. This is the same thing with the guy Nick that found the Minnesota. Yeah, found the Minnesota stuff. And actually, some people may not remember this, but the one Luke that did this investigation also was the one who he discovered the Loudoun County bathroom situation in Virginia. So he clearly is like a dedicated. person to this now it would be great if a congressman or senator could pick this up and say well we're going to try to fix the problem ironically reconciliation is an opportunity to do that in theory if there are reconciliation instructions that go to ways and means and finance, those committees have jurisdiction over Medicaid, and they can change the rules. Unfortunately, the reconciliation instructions out right now only go to judiciary and his GAC, which is Homeland Security. So the current package doesn't give Congress an opportunity to look at this, but certainly some people need to start thinking, how can we fix this? All right, we got a lot more to go. Joel's going to stick around for the next at least two or three segments. But as we do every day, we've got to do a question of the day. Questions today, Joelle, who was your favorite teacher going up? I should have done this in last hour and I forgot to. Oh, my favorite teacher, probably my American government and history teachers. I had multiple of them, but Mr. Lewis probably was the most formative when I was in high school. And you brought somebody special in here with you today. My daughter, Claudia, is here. Who are your all-time? I know you're pretty young, so you don't have a lot, but who are your all-time favorite teachers? Well, first is Miss DeSibia. She helps me with everything, and she's just really nice and helpful. And so I guess Ms. Apoka, whenever somebody's sad, she'll help you. And one time she brought pom-poms to class, and she did tears for us on a math test. I always feel like this is sort of a trick question because... Mine's obviously going to be my mom since I was homeschooled. It's like an easy one. All right back, Joel, Canada, Elijah Har here at KWTO, don't forget. You can come out at 530, meet Eric Erickson, have a beer, have some food, come out and meet us. But we'll be right back after these messages.

or not so young, partners are alone, well-to-do, or sometimes agonizingly poor. It's the Elijah Harshow, 93am 560, KWTO. Welcome back to KWTL on a beautiful Monday afternoon. Eric Erickson going to be in studio here. Wednesday afternoon. Eric Erickson going to be here at 530. So come by the station if you want. Joel Cannon, we're going to ask this question I asked in the last hour. Okay, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, or a candidate to be named later, who do you think is or should be the Republican nominee? Oh, you're asking me. Okay. I thought we were doing like compare and contrast. Um. Who do I think should be? Well, I don't think it will be Marco Rubio. I like Marco Rubio a lot. I don't think it will be Marco Rubio. It's probably going to be someone between either JD Vance and an unnamed person. Why do you not think Marco Rubio? You know, that he runs? I just don't think he's going to do it. Although, they all want to do it. I just think he had such a terrible experience the first time, although there will not be anybody like Trump this time around in theory. It's like that Shane Gillis. It's like the Shane Gillis get where he's like. I just want people to debate Trump because he's so much better than everybody at it. Yeah, I mean, watching those debates, it's like it's comedy hour. You know, it's like watching the nightly comedy show. But I guess one of his sons may run or maybe Ivanka, but I doubt it. And she probably wouldn't treat people quite like her dad does. But. You know, I think just comparing the two of them, they're both super likable. They come off normal. We'll see. JD Vance has three kids. He could have another one. Marco Rubio has four. Isn't his wife pregnant? Is she pregnant right now? Yeah, she's pregnant. Oh, again? Well, anyway, so they're going to both have four children. I don't know. They're very similar, except Marco Rubio is, in my mind, a little more sort of classic Republican conservative. And JD Vance is... trying to populist the new way. And then there's always Josh Holly. See, and that's before we get to the player be named later, my thought is this. Once you get to that level, you don't take an election off if you can run. Like we've seen it with Elizabeth Warren missed her chance to run for president. Not two to one, but she missed her a chance. She would have run in 2016. Chris Christie ran four years too late and was like, clearly never take it seriously when he ran. And so if you're really JD Vance, because I think it's kind of JD Vance's to cite he doesn't want. But if you're JD Vance, you're going to run. There's no way he doesn't run. And we cited the statistic in the last hour. The last time a sitting vice president won was George H.B. Bush, and that's the last time in the last 150 years that the sitting VP won. Now, we've had a few that have four years later, eight years later, come back and got it.

But if you're JD Vance, you look at the math, you might be like, maybe I wait. Maybe I wait. But what's he going to do in the meantime? Well, that's the thing. And that's, you know, again, recent history cluttered with bodies of people who thought, oh, I can run, and then time passed them by. There's always a new, whoever the next person up is. And so I think JD Vance runs no matter what. And honestly, I think Ribio's people are probably like, go do it. It's a tough cycle. You take the shot. If you don't get it in 32, it's my turn. And it's a better electorate to run in. And his popularity is far greater now than it was when he ran the first time. No one outside of really Washington, D.C. even knew who he was when he ran the first time, in my opinion. I knew him. He had come in with a tea party. He was a very smart senator, very accessible. He really cared about one thing and one thing only, and that was immigration, being a Cuban, you know. immigrated from Cuba or whatever, but maybe his parents did. I guess he couldn't run. At least his parents didn't kill Robert F. Kennedy Jr. like Ted Cruz's. Exactly. But... You know, I think he's much more popular now, more mainstream, more well-known, even today. Did you guys talk about on the first hour? He answered this question today. He was asked, like, what's your hope for America? And it's just like, okay, cue the political ad music. His answer was fantastic. He had a line in there. The idea that anyone from anywhere can do anything. I'm like, that's so good. He just rattled it off like he'd been preparing for that question. for the whole week. But he's so, he kind of undersells it the way he says it and it's so believable that he actually feels this way. And I think he truly does. And he somehow comes off as not having been jaded by being in the system for so long. And then JD Vance, on the other hand. You know, he's kind of, he has a cynic sort of, I think he could come off like, oh, yeah, I'm going to just call your BS or this is, I'm sort of a cynic this way. But that's because he came from nothing. And he, you know, I think has really just built his own brand. And there's a lot of people that can identify with that. I continue to believe that it'll be JD Vance unless he decides not to run. I think he'll run. But I will say this, the reason Marco Rubio's campaign crashed and burned the last time. You remember it? Chris Christie basically saying that Marco Rubio was a robot and just could memorize Q cards well. And then Marco Rubio walked into the punch and started repeating the line that he was used to. And one thing that you've seen over the last year, nobody really knows what JD Vance is doing. But Marco Rubio has been meaned to death, and it's really humanized him to the average person. All those pictures of him dressed up in different outfits. Oh, now Ruby has to do this. Oh, now Marco Rubio has to do that. It is humanized him, which is what he didn't have in 2016. Listen, I was on Team Marco Rubio in 2016 as the veteran of that campaign. We still occasionally text, and the joke is we weren't wrong. We were just early.

He's probably, I want to say, our last best hope for 2028, but in my opinion, I have a hard time coming up with somebody that I think would do better as our nominee in the 2020 election. Certainly in the general. I don't know if he'll make it out of the primary. That would be the main thing. My guess is he only runs if JD Vance doesn't. If JD Vance doesn't run and Marco Rubio runs, let's get to the player renamed later. Can anybody beat Marco Rubio? Well, I mean, Josh Holly is certainly considering a run for president. I assume Ted Cruz wants to do it again. Yes, he does. Maybe a Rick Scott. Like there's a bunch of names that surface from time to time, people with money, people with the network, people that, you know, think it's their time. I just, I assume it's either JD Vance or Marco Rubio, and I'm having a harder and harder time talking myself into anybody beating whichever one of those two runs. And I don't think they run against each other. Well, I mean, in that case, it'll be the last, it'll be the most recent time we have had a senator, right? Because where was Biden? It was, oh, Obama was the last one who was like left the Senate and went there. Now, neither one of them are there now. But, yeah. I mean, I think, I think Eric Schmidt may consider it. I think I don't know. I think he, we both know he wants to be president. He wants to. It may be early. Well, and I think if JD Vance or Marco Rubio's nominee, I think I could see Schmidt ending up on the ticket. I think certainly that's got to be in the back of his head. Listen, I think every senator is thinking there's a path where I become president, right? Or vice president. Right. I mean, basically, if you're elected and you live in Washington, D.C., you're definitely thinking that. When I lived there, I worked for a congressman who used to give us a picture of himself, and he would say, hold on to that. I may be president one day. We always thought he was joking, but it. The joke was on us because he actually became vice president, but never made it to the big office. In fact, when you worked in D.C., didn't you end up in somebody who might end up being president an article about somebody who could be president in 10 years? Yeah, I was. There was an article about me. I immediately, the Washington Post did, like, who could be president in 2028 or something? Unfortunately, one of the four people they picked was born in Ukraine. So I pretty much at that point knew this was not a... Good list. I'm guessing neither JD Vance or Marco Rubio was on their list of who could be president in 2020. No, definitely not. Okay, we've only got a couple more minutes before bottom of the hour news. But if we're playing it out today, and I know we've got the lifetime in politics, how do you feel about the Republican chances of winning in 28? Because I'm fairly bearish on that. Yeah, I don't I don't think it's looking so hot. I do think that is one reason that JD Vance is sort of like you said, you know, nobody knows what he's doing right now. Well, now he's been given this golden gift of waste, fraud and abuse, and he is the head of this fraud task force because he can say, well, I spent my whole time doing that. Nobody's going to complain about that except for like liberals who are propping up these Somalian daycares. But he can distance himself from anything in this White House. But I do think it's going to be an uphill battle. I feel like JD Vance has been tasked as the heavy and Marco is the good guy. You've got a good cop, bad cop situation. It's always JD Vance that's like punching people on Twitter, going flying over to Iran and telling them there's no deal, doing all the negative stuff. And then it's, it's Marco Rubio that's.

Mr. Fun, Mr. DJ, Mr. Pressure, Pressure. Like, he's got, gets to do all the cool sunny optimism stuff. And JD Vance is like, I'm going to punch you. Yeah. I mean, you kind of need both, I guess. It is kind of odd. The State Department, in theory, that's a big job. Ruby is sort of available for anything right now. It is weird. I don't know what he's doing in America, quite frankly, but it's great. He runs the State Department. He's the press court will Levits out. He's doing, he's DJ in that down in Miami. He's kind of doing everything. And the crazy thing is he's doing it without seeming to let any balls drop. I mean, Christy Dome could not run her department without, you know, completely screwing it all up. We saw Pam Bondi couldn't run the DOJ without. Totally falling on her face. Somehow Marco Rubio managed to run everything and do it perfectly competently. Well, my guess is he's hired good staff. He did that when he was in the Senate. And as much as it is about Marco, it's not about Marco. He certainly, I mean, it doesn't take a genius not to run a $200 million campaign ad about yourself. So Christy sort of had it coming, I think. All right. We've got bottom of the hour news coming up next. We're going to come back on the other side of that. We've got to talk about redistricting. Huge primary night in Indiana last night. We saw Trump flex his political muscle again. We'll talk about what states are going to redistrict and whether it happens in Missouri. Plus, come out to KWTO. We've got Eric Erickson here. Pines and politics. You want to come by the studio and say hello. Certainly do that. I'm Elijah Harrow. This is KVTO.

93 and AM 560 KWTO News From the spacious KWTO Studios, it's the Elijah Harshow, 93 AM 560 KWTO. These results are a clear display of President Trump's influence over the party. He took aim at seven Republican state senators in Indiana who opposed the GOP effort to redraw the congressional maps. Five of the seven lost to Trump-backed challengers. Trevor DeVry won in District 1. Brian Schmutzler in District 11. Blake Fletcher in 19. Tracy Jerome Powell in District 21. Michelle Davis won District 41. One incumbent state Senator Greg Good survived, and one race is still too close to call. Welcome back to KWTO on Wednesday. I'm Elijah Har and we've got Eric Erickson in studios tonight. If you want to come by the studios and say hello, you should do that. It's our politics and pitan event. I'll walk out of this studio here about 6 o'clock. But Joel Canaan's with us for the second hour of the show. And Joe L. Cannon last night, Donald Trump flexes his political muscle in a Republican primary, knocking out, knocking out of the seven Republican senators in eating out of it said, I know our state's... 20-point Republican state, but we just don't think we should do any sort of redistricting. Since that happened, we've heard South Carolina is going to redistrict, Tennessee is going to redistrict, obviously Louisiana's going to redistrict. It seems like we've got a lot of this stuff happening ever since the VRA decision came down from the Supreme Court, and then we've, you know, we had the Ron DeSantis situation happen down in Florida. So I had this conversation with some people in Missouri because I'm like, listen. Last year, we had a special session. We went to 7-1. But we don't have to keep St. Louis as one district anymore. We could make this state, 8-0 state. Do you think we should do that? And do you think we will do that? I think they'll try. I don't know how well it will go. So I think what choice do they have but to try, especially after last night, right? That's my sense. Now, the problem is I think they're going to wait until after the election cycle is false. Yeah. Which is fine. Whatever. Alex Riley will be the speaker next year. But I think they'll actually get it done. I mean, look, we've got two-thirds majorities in the House and said, how could we not get it done? I'm surprised that the White House hasn't dialed up Mike Keenman like, hey. Can you just get it done now for these upcoming elections? It is surprising and they could call a special for it or something like that. But I agree with the idea of waiting. You know, this idea, oh, how could they not get it done? There's plenty that the state legislature has not done or that has done that they've done that's been in contrast to what I would think would be a super majority. Like, oh, a gas tax increase. So, you know, to say like, oh, yeah, they'll definitely do it because we have a super majority.

a great thought. And I mean, they should have done it the first time. It's really hard not to just say that. Like, why didn't you just get it right the first time? I mean, they couldn't have done 80 last year because this VRA decision basically said you have to protect certain areas of minority populations. But as soon as that VRA decision came down, I was like, well, now's the perfect time. I've seen a variety of different maps that have been published that show we could draw. I think every single district in the state would be a plus 12 Republican district. And not only that, it's not even that weird. We're not looking at these weird salamander-style districts. They're all pretty basic. We've got a few emanating out of St. Louis, a few out of Kansas City. They're all very Republican. They all would work very well for us. And again, why would we give a Democrat congressman in St. Louis a two-year term now? If we redistrict now, We could deny them that opportunity. I was talking to Eric Erickson the last hour, and he's like, well, we can't do that in Georgia because we've already started early voting, but that's not starting Missouri. Our session ends a week from Friday. We could start our next special session, the Monday after that, and just go ahead and roll on. They definitely could but I haven't heard any rumblings of that and you know I think leadership at this point has been fighting all these battles and it's probably just easier for them to be like we'll let next the next round of people do it and the next round of people are going to be fresh Alex Riley and that whole crew and it's going to be like okay well we have a mission now Do you think, you know, if, let's say hypothetically, we go into the November elections. And a lot of people are like, it's going to be a rough year, but there's a chance, Virginia, you know, they tried to go from 6-5 down to 10-1 down. There's a chance there's Supreme Court throws it out. We're picking up some seats in Florida. We're picking up a seat in Tennessee and South Carolina and Alabama and maybe Louisiana. If we get to the November elections and it doesn't go that bad, but we still lose Congress by a few votes. Are there going to be some Monday morning quarterbackers that go back, hey, Missouri, you could have saved us here. I mean, I'm kind of surprised. What didn't we do? We could have done a 7-1, right? And we did a 6-2. No, no. We did it. We had a 6-2 and then we did 7-1. We did 7-1. We did some debate where they weren't even going to do that. That is concerning. I guess we did the best we could at the time. But I have always kind of felt that way about any of the states that didn't take the... take it and do it because what do we have in the house? I mean, one, two, 14 or something. It's like we have no, there's no margin in the house already. I mean, I looked back. So I always say in Missouri, 2021 through 2024 was like this conservative black hole where nothing good happened. We passed the gas tax increase. We passed all kinds of crazy stuff. And we drew a 6-2 map when several of us were saying, you guys should do 7-1. They come back last year. They fixed 7-1. But I'm not holding my breath that we're going to go 8-0. It would be great to see. But unless Donald Trump picks up the bat phone, I don't think it's going to happen. Well, we're definitely, you know, when I was a kid, it was like, oh, Missouri's a swing state. And you'd watch the presidential returns. And it was like, how's Missouri going to go? Well, it's just not that way anymore. It really hasn't been, I don't think, since the second Bush term. And, you know, 8-0 is actually great. I just generally have been disappointed in Missouri elected officials who.

who legislate like we are a purple state when we're clearly a fully red state at this point. What is it about Missouri? Because we watch Tennessee and Arkansas and Florida and Texas. Just jumping ahead, like swinging away. I mean, Ron DeSantis doesn't even wait for VRA. He just says, oh, we're 20 to 8. We can be 24. And he does it in two days. I don't understand why Missouri is always like, Well, let's let everybody else do something conservative and then we'll consider it. I do wonder if it's just because a bunch of Democrats became Republicans when it became clear Republicans were going to be in the majority in Missouri. So we have a pretty moderate. view. That could be. And I also think, you know, there's a lot of, it wasn't that long ago that Missouri was a swing state. I mean, 10 years ago, we still had a bunch of statewide Democrats. I mean, Jay Nixon was governor and we had top to bottom. I mean, we had two at that point, right? No, we had everything but lieutenant governor was Democrat at that point. And that was only 10 years ago. It's not been that long. Plus, we have a Democratic senator. That's concerning. Well, that's what I'm saying is I feel like there's an institutional thought that, oh, we're still kind of a swing state. And the Republicans now in Jefferson City have to get through head. We're not a swing state anymore. We've got to start acting like a red state. No, yeah, I think that they act like the elected officials act like we're a purple state. But the actual constituent is not that. Yeah. And I think there's a few things that not only do we need to do some things like from the perspective of redistricting, but also we have this ongoing problem where the Missouri legislature passes something, and that stuff gets thrown out in the courts. And until we do some sort of modification to the court plan, we're just going to be beholden to a judiciary that is always about one click left of where the population in Missouri is. Yeah, and the whole, the constitutional issue, too. It's like, oh, you don't like what the legislature passed. We're just going to go shove it through the Constitution, which is embarrassing. Absolutely. All right. Like I said, if you want to come by the station, doors are open now. Eric Erickson is here. Come by, politics and pints, grab a beer. Come by the station, introduce yourself. We'd love to meet you. We're going to be finishing up at 6, and then I'll come down and join the rest of the crowd. But there's a group already in the lobby. We've got one more segment still to go. I'm Elijah Har with Joe L. Cannon, and we'll be right back. It's Jerry Nolan. When did things go south in the United States? I would say 1913. We came up. It's the Elijah Har Show. 93-3 AM 560 KWTO. Welcome back to KWTO on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon. As I've mentioned already, if you haven't been listening to show, Eric Erickson's here in person, come by the studio, come say hi to Eric, come say hi to our wake-up, Missouri morning show hosts, and grab a beer, talk politics with us. We'll be here until at least seven, but Joel Cannon's in studio with us today. Joel, we talked about this a little bit earlier in the show, but there's a talk ever since Nick Shirley.

Went to the Quality Learing Center and figured out the Somalian daycare fraud in Minnesota. Suddenly, everybody wants to go look at it. We've got the Medicaid fraud going on in California. We've now got a new report on what's going on in Ohio. Tell us about that. Yeah, really exciting new report. I find it exciting anyway. A guy named Luke Roziak, he works for the Daily Wire. He's an investigative journalist. And a couple months ago, he decided to take a look at the online data that Doge had released regarding Medicaid providers. And anyone can do this. You can go online, check out... the Medicaid provider database and you can search like your state your city and it will show you the list of providers and like Minnesota which is where the daycare fraud scam was. Ohio also had a lot of waivers. They passed a lot of waivers to expand Medicaid. So beyond its original purpose, which is to provide health and health care to poor people, they said that beneficiaries could get Medicaid money for things like homemaking, chores. being a personal, providing personal services, cleaning, being a companion for someone. And so, you know, when you have a waiver like that that makes the program very expansive, you don't have to be a nurse or an actual health care provider to bill Medicaid and get paid for it, the fraudsters moved in. And in the database, when he went and looked at Ohio, there were hundreds of names that were foreign, there were foreign names, like, Omar, Omar, Mohamed Ali, you know, and rotating like... Muhammad Ali. Whatever, like, rotate. Taking care of or running it. Right. Rotating like all these, you know, five or eight different names rotating them through. And then you'd click in and you'd look at the provider. And they'd have like 94 different home health quote companies that all had the same address. And then a lot of times the owners of these companies' birthday was listed as January 1st because it was like, well, they didn't have a real birthday. So they just picked January 1, which is extremely odd. Well, this was one of the things that I've heard about fraud. If you're trying to do fraud at scale, they say don't. Don't create a bunch of different things because you can't remember them all. Keep everything roughly the same. So if you just pick a birthday, you have to pick it for everybody. Or otherwise, when you're going to log into your 93rd Shell Corporation, you can't remember what you've written down for that one. Yes, 100%. And I think, you know, this investigator, he saw these foreign names and decided, all right, I'm going to go to Ohio. I'm going to figure it out. And he talks about in his report, you know, he's driving down Columbus Avenue, like,

Cleveland Avenue in the middle of downtown Columbus and there were all these billboards that said like are you caring for a loved one at home get paid get support call you know home health care LLC so essentially like he went to many of the buildings he says you know he has a picture of one There's 94 companies supposedly in this abandoned building with no windows. They build $66 million to the Ohio Medicaid program. So he's saying in the last how many ever years, probably a billion dollars in fraud in, in, uh, you know, in Ohio, who knows if you expand that beyond that. But it's happening in every state, definitely. Like, we're seeing it. There's a hospice, there's a program in California where a fourth of the hospice facilities that got federal funding were all fraudulent. Minnesota daycare. Sort of, it's a formula, like you said, that they're using. And, you know, in this example, Plenty of examples. One lady had what was considered a janitorial business. She essentially converted it into a Medicaid billing operation. She billed Medicaid $100,000 in the first month. Now, the interesting thing, the Medicaid program cost taxpayers, federal taxpayers, about $610 billion a year. Then the states match the money they get. So that's like an... Not match, but like it's a submatch. So about another $300 billion. So almost a trillion dollars a year in Medicaid spending if you combine states and the federal government. And then if you divide that out by the number of recipients, we're spending about $9,000 to $10,000 per recipient. in this Medicaid money. But unfortunately, it's not the actual sick people or the poor people who are getting it. It's their, quote, providers, which is essentially paying a family member to hang out with you. The problem is these family members, they don't have like 94 family members that are on the program. They're definitely defrauding the system. This is something you and I have discussed a lot. Everybody always talks about waste, fraud, and abuse. In this Ohio example, it's the same as Minnesota. It's the same as California. Is it waste? Is it fraud? Is it abuse or some combination? Well, I would say this one is definitely wide-scale fraud. There's an argument to be made. One person said, you know, if you've got 15 homeless programs and three of them are really effective and the other 12 or not, it is wasteful to spend money on the other 12. So he puts that in the waste category. But something like this, you know, where you have sort of a systematic, prolific group of people that are going in and systematically defrauding the system. I think it's fraud. It's interesting because it wasn't that just a few weeks ago, Dr. Oz was on TV and said, listen, we've been looking at Medicaid fraud in California. We found millions and millions of dollars of fraud. We stopped the payments and not one single person called us and said, hey, we need these payments. Clearly, it's just running into a black hole. And I got to wonder, you know,

Ohio is not a blue state. They had a Republican governor. So clearly, somebody is asleep at the controls, and it makes me wonder, has anybody done a full-scale dig and dive into Missouri? You know, if I was Governor Mike Kehoe, and I know he announced maybe... I think he did announce something today. Well, a couple days ago, he announced that they're going to try to work with Dr. Oz to do a scale. You would think they would say, hey, let's set up our own state doge. Let's have... You know, Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick, he loves this kind of stuff. Let's put a couple people together and say, go dig into the numbers and figure out where we're bleeding off money because before some enterprising journalists figures it out in Missouri and makes us look bad. And makes us look bad. I'd want to beat that story and be like, look, look, look, we found the fraud and we are, we are like rooting that fraud out. I definitely think that, you know, AI tools and. sort of technology makes it a lot more possible to recognize patterns. If you can get the data and dump it into a system that can analyze it quickly, this should not take nearly as long as it used to take. Yeah. And it's one of those things. Waste fraud and abuse, everybody in America likes the idea of rooting it out. Because for, you know, 99% of Americans in my mind are not looking to cheat the system. And maybe. Maybe 60% of the foreigners that are here are trying to do it or the Somali population. But most Americans, they don't want to do it. And it also sort of sparks the idea that, hey, maybe we don't have to dramatically, you know, right-sized government. Maybe you don't have to raise taxes to try to get our deficit under control. Maybe there is enough waste fraud and abuse that we could root it out and fix our deficit problems. That may be a little panacea, but who knows? Well, I think. really it should be people on both sides of the aisle that want to fix this problem because if you think a program should be fully funded at a million dollars a year but half of that money is going to fraud if you get rid of the fraud you do not have to increase funding for the program without Like in order to increase the actual money going to services. So if you're spending a million and half of it's going to fraud and you fix the fraud, then you're actually getting your full million that's going to the people who need it. So I really think that this issue should be something that people who really care about their recipients are focused on. I ask you this all the time because every week you come on and talk about waste fraud and abuse. And I always ask this question, but what's our ability to claw this money back? Is there any? Can they go to Ohio and be like, let's jail the people that did it and let's, you know. They are going to try. They are going to try. The JD Vance task force is definitely the DOJ, the IGs. Like they're all going after. They're prosecuting people. They're trying to throw them in jail. But the idea, it's like pennies on the dollar, what you can actually get in a settlement or in a case when you prosecute somebody. And then if they even have the money. Most of it has gone to Lamborghinis, yachts, things like that.

I read this fascinating story today about a guy who essentially had that situation. He filmed an ad. They literally had a truck that did not have an engine. They filmed an ad of the truck rolling down a hill, and they tilted the camera so it looked like it was driving. They called it a hydrogen tuck. He named his company, Nikolai, after Nikolai Tesla, and he scammed people out of billions of investment dollars. Of course, he ends up going to jail for seven and a half years, and then he got pardoned. But he, and he's been ordered to pay, I think it was like $20 million, $20 billion, $20 billion in the number of restitution. Of course, he doesn't have it. All the money's gone, gone abroad, gone off seas. And I feel like that's what we're going to see in Ohio, in Minnesota, these states, the money's gone. There's probably no chance to clot back. All right. Like I said, last time I'm going to tell you this because we are running out of time. But if you want to come by the station today, we've got Eric Erickson here in the studio, politics and pride, come grab a beer, grab some food, meet Eric, say hello, meet me, say hello. We'll be here until at least 7 o'clock, but as we do every day on the show, we're going to finish with the court of the day. Power corrupts, absolutely. We'll see you tomorrow on the Elijah Harshow.

This land is my land From California To the New York Island From the New York Island From the redwood forest To the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me As I was walking That river of highway I saw above me. That endless skyway I saw below me. That golden valley. This land. Maggie 3.3 AM 560 KWTO Springfield. K-227-A-L Springfield.