Jon Husted

Jon Husted, who spent six years helping run the state as lieutenant governor, showed up at a hearing of his Senate colleagues this week to weigh in with gravitas on potential Ohio Medicaid fraud.

Today in Ohio podcast hosts said Friday he’s the latest Ohio Republican to act like an outsider and profess outrage about this issue. But Husted, like the others, offer not explanation about how they let such fraud happen on their watch.

As Lisa Garvin recounted on the podcast, Husted testified that “millions of people are illegally on the Medicaid rolls due to lax eligibility standards. More must be done and we shouldn’t tolerate it anywhere.” He also pointed to provisions in the 2025 federal tax bill — the so-called “big beautiful bill” — as a vehicle for requiring more frequent eligibility checks going forward.

Those would be strong and reasonable words from an outsider, but Husted was a central figure in Ohio’s state government for years until moving to the Senate last year. Host Chris Quinn said Husted’s righteous indignation was hard to take seriously.

“It’s fascinating to me how all these Republicans are pretending to stand on the outside and say, we’ve got to fix this… Where were you? You were in charge. Why didn’t you fix it while it was going on?” Quinn asked.

Ohio’s state government has been run by Republicans since 2011. Any systemic problems with Medicaid happened because Republicans let it happen. Rather than profess phony outrage, don’t they owe Ohioans an explanation about how they let it happen?

Garvin noted that one expert witness at the hearing argued that states don’t have the financial incentive to aggressively crack down on Medicaid fraud because 70 percent of the money originates with the federal government, but that still means a lot of state taxpayer money goes to it, too.

Earlier in the week, a lineup of elected Ohio Republicans took to the stage to decry Medicaid fraud just like Husted, without acknowledging that if it happened, they are the ones who let it happen.

At the heart of the discussion, though, is whether fraud exists at the kind of scale Republicans are claiming. Good questions have been raised about some recipients of the money, but reasonable explanations might exist.

Husted is running to stay in the office that Gov. Mike DeWine appointed him to. Maybe by expressing his outrage, he attempts to deflect attention from any responsibility he had to make sure Medicaid was fraud free.

Listen to the discussion here.

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