Luke Rosiak

Well, I've been fascinated by Medicaid for many years because people pointed this out when Doge was in its infancy, that they're kind of nibbling around the edges in discretionary funding, but a huge portion of the federal budget is actually locked up in what they call non-discretionary funding, things like Medicaid.

And we were led to believe that there's just nothing you can do about that.

It just is what it is.

The government has always been kind of secretive about what went on in Medicaid.

It was just a black box, which was a little strange because we're not really interested in prying into people's personal medical information.

We don't want the names of patients.

But if we're paying for something, it would be helpful to know what it is.

And so Doge, as one of its last actions before it kind of left the limelight, they released this database and it was something like 40 gigabytes.

It was a huge data set and you kind of had to know computer programming to dive in.

But it was a game changer.

I mean, I've never seen anything like it.

It was a fundamental breakthrough in terms of government transparency.

And it just let you see what companies were billing government millions of dollars for services that are not even like regular doctor's offices, like extra stuff.

And so it got to the heart of a lot of the fraud that we've heard about in places like Minnesota today.

Because those are actually all the result of Tim Walz's what they call Medicaid waivers that's let certain states do things that are well beyond the medical treatment that Medicaid was really designed for.

And so the first step in this investigative process was essentially building this massive computer server and doing a lot of programming that would let me mine through all these records adding up to billions of dollars a year.

So Ohio immediately emerged as a top spender on these especially suspicious payments because it also has waivers like Minnesota that actually let people get paid to hang out with their own family.

And they don't have to be like medical professionals.

professionals or anything.

They can literally just provide what they call conversation and companionship to their own family members.