Jim Jordan

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan used a contentious House oversight hearing on Medicaid fraud allegations in Ohio on Wednesday to suggest that an Ohio Democratic state legislator of Somali descent may have helped set up companies accused of defrauding the federal government.

At the debut hearing of the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses, Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, zeroed in on state Rep. Ismail Ali Mohamed, a Columbus Democrat. Jordan, a Republican, noted that Mohamed’s law office is located at the same address as roughly 35 home health care companies that conservative reporter Luke Rosiak of The Daily Wire has linked to alleged Medicaid billing fraud.

“Do you happen to know if Mr. Mohamed was the lawyer who helped set up these LLCs who were ripping off the taxpayers?” Jordan asked Rosiak.

“I don’t know,” Rosiak replied.

“Maybe that’s the next thing you can dig into,” said Champaign County’s Jordan, who alleged that Mohamed got “thousands of dollars” in campaign contributions from the companies in his building.

Mohamed, who graduated from Ohio State University for both his undergraduate and law degrees, declined to comment through a spokesperson.

According to his online biography, his legal practice handles personal injury, immigration and criminal law cases. He also works free of charge on expungements and evictions.

The hearing was testy even before witnesses spoke. Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican who chairs the task force, refused to allow Democratic U.S. House members from Ohio to ask questions, and declined to recognize Rep. Shontel Brown, a Warrensville Heights Democrat who sits on the Oversight Committee and was present and attempting to participate.

“This is a slap in the face to the people of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio,” said a statement from Brown. “How can Oversight Republicans have a hearing on Medicaid in Ohio and not allow someone on the committee who represents Ohio to participate? The answer is simple: They were afraid.”

She accused Republicans of “creating a political narrative to scapegoat minorities and push more cuts to health care.”

Sweeping claims, significant caveats

The hearing showcased some of the most striking claims Rosiak and Republican officials have made about alleged Medicaid fraud concentrated in Columbus — while also underscoring the limitations of the underlying data.

Rosiak told the task force that a single building in Columbus housed 94 companies that collectively billed Medicaid more than $66 million and that 15% of all home health spending in Ohio occurred in two Columbus-area zip codes.

“I visited hundreds of home health care companies and only saw, I think, two people that didn’t have an accent,” Rosiak told the task force, adding that operators of all the companies he investigated more deeply had names of Somali, Bhutanese or other African origin.

He described a janitor who “renamed her LLC to be Mental Health and started billing Medicaid $100,000 in the first month, later up to $650,000 in one month, and then she left the country.” He described one home health company run by “a man with three fraud convictions and by his wife, who has three theft convictions” and said that when he asked the man basic questions, “he threatened my family.”

But as cleveland.com has previously reported, the Medicaid billing data Rosiak has cited tracks payments flowing through providers — it does not show whether services were actually provided. Many home health companies function as fiscal intermediaries, handling payroll and paperwork for caregivers, including family members caring for relatives at home, and are not retaining all of the money flowing through them.

The Ohio Department of Medicaid has stopped approving new home health care and hospice providers for six months while it reviews the program.

Ohio Auditor Keith Faber told the House task force that his office had identified “potentially up to $4.4 billion in fraud-related exposure connected to ineligible recipients in Ohio’s Medicaid programs” and that 56% of home care services were not processed through the Electronic Visit Verification system — representing an estimated $1.1 billion in paid claims not matched with verified visits.

“Our audit work identified problems involving incomplete or inaccurate visit data, inconsistent provider compliance, and insufficient oversight mechanisms,” said Faber.

Republicans ran Ohio throughout the period in question

Democrats repeatedly pointed out that Republicans have controlled Ohio’s state government — including its Medicaid program — for more than a decade, raising questions about who bears responsibility for any oversight failures.

“They hold the House, the Senate, the governor’s office and four statewide offices,” said Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio, a Lakewood Democrat, who was a witness at the hearing.

She displayed a poster that showed their years-long dominance of state offices.

”If there is fraud in Medicaid, it has happened on the Republican majority’s watch,” said Antonio.

Antonio also noted that Republicans abolished the Joint Medicaid Oversight Committee, a bipartisan panel she said had proven effective at catching problems, including exposing anti-competitive practices by pharmacy benefit managers that she said saved Ohio Medicaid over $140 million in 2025.

“Perhaps it’s time to clean Ohio’s house,” said Antonio.

Jordan, however, pointed to more than 100 convictions in Ohio Medicaid fraud cases as evidence that “they’re actually doing something about it” — and dismissed Antonio’s broader criticism by noting that Ohio Rep. Mohamed “is a Democrat.”

Rosiak’s testimony ranged well beyond specific billing anomalies into sweeping claims about Somali and Bhutanese immigrant communities. He portrayed both as systematically exploiting Medicaid to enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense.

He also alleged that some of the fraud was effectively functioning as a foreign aid pipeline, saying “some of this is being used systematically by refugees to bring money back to their home countries.” He told the task force: “If Congress wants to send money to Bhutan, it needs to do that above board.”

The task force chairman echoed those themes in his own opening statement, saying that the fraud problem was connected to what he called the overuse of America’s immigration system.

“For too long, our government allowed foreigners from low-trust societies with very little vetting to pour into our communities,” Gill said, adding: “We can’t back down to fraud simply because of spurious accusations of racism.”

Those claims drew a sharp reaction from Antonio, who said she was “almost brought to tears” by what she called “the level of hateful rhetoric” at the hearing before Gill cut her off, saying she was out of time.

Democrats push back on pardons, cuts

Democrats used the hearing to highlight Trump administration actions they said undercut anti-fraud efforts, including President Trump’s clemency grants to individuals convicted of health care fraud.

Democrats described a proposed $1.8 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of political prosecutions as its own form of fraud on taxpayers. Rep. James Walkinshaw of Virginia rattled off a list of what he called constitutional violations by the Trump administration — from firing independent inspectors general to giving DOGE access to individual Social Security numbers and bank account numbers — and suggested the task force’s stated mission of “defending constitutional rights and exposing institutional abuses” would be better directed at the White House than at Ohio’s Medicaid program.

The task force’s top Democrat, Rep. Lateefah Simon of California said the Republican “Big Beautiful Bill” cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and other programs, and that more than 450,000 Ohioans are expected to lose health insurance coverage by 2034 as a result.

Simon said she rejected the hearing’s premise that public benefit programs are “inherently suspect” and that recipients should be viewed “with skepticism and distrust rather than compassion.”

She said she had personal experience with home health services while caring for her late husband, and warned that hearings like Wednesday’s can be pretexts for something larger.

“What concerns me most is that too often conversations like this one are not actually about accountability,” she said. “They become the justification for gutting the social safety net that Americans have paid into. They become a justification for making it harder for people to access care. They become the justification for undermining programs that millions of people depend on each and every day, and they become the justification for subjugating entire classes of people.”