June 5, 2026 • 16 mins
THE MEDICAID SCAM IN COLORADO: PART TWO The Denver Gazette’s David Migoya continues his excellent series on what is called “the program”. David is joining me at 2:30 to talk about the Home Health care agency that has scammed millions from taxpayers using homeless people to do it. Read part two here.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A series of stories, one yesterday, three today by reporter
David mcgoya, uncovering what I am going to call blaytant
medical medicaid fraud.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And now he didn't call it that in the in.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
The article because he just gave the facts, as a
good journalist does. David mcgoya joins us now to talk
about this. Let's start at the beginning. How did you
even begin to dig into this story?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
We had to find out about it first. But Hi,
Mandy be back.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
I haven't seen you in a while, and I wanted
to add a footnote. I love pigs in a blanket,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Everyone does.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Everyone loves pigs in a blanket. You cannot go wrong,
go wrong.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
This one came to me. Our lead story yesterday in
the Denver Gazette was a woman named Kelly Swainson. Kelly
had actually posted something on next door, the app that
neighbors talk to each other and I'm going to kind
of keep track of what's going on there, and she
basically had put out there, I've got this tale or
story about medicaid that you know, if anyone is interested
(00:58):
in knowing that kind of thing. I sent her a
note and I said you know, I'm an investigative reporter,
happy to talk to you. And it took I don't know,
three four weeks. Oh, there's back in November or so
maybe okay, And with that I just started listening to
what she was telling me and it didn't really sound
terribly unusual at first. And then as she better described
(01:20):
the homeless, the houses and all the things going on,
then it was piquing my interest.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
But not quite enough yet.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
And then when she mentioned the payments that they were receiving.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Let's not get ahead of the story yet, because the
story that she told you, and the story that you
lay out in these multiple stories, is that homeless people
are being recruited by a health agency, a home service
health agency, and they're being recruited with the promise of
lodging and not like in a shelter like that. They're
(01:52):
being housed in really nice suburban houses in Aurora, far
away from transit, far away from retail. And the old
only condition that they are given initially is that they
must be enrolled in Medicaid and they must be a
client of this home health agency.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Correct, yes, there was an addition in that.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Before that could happen, they had to go see the
very same doctor. Okay, everyone I spoke with and there
was better than a dozen of them that were part
of this program said they all had to see this
one doctor in Aurora. And it wasn't put to them
in that you need to go see this guy and
then you find your way to him.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
We're going to take you to him, oh physically, like
everybody in the car and off we go and let's
go visit the doctor.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
So there was no room for you to do it
on your own. You had to go with them, and
their prescription was gotten. You had to have a prescription
because the home health agency. What they were doing is
part of home health is they do a medicinal administration.
They count out the pills, so they made sure you
got the prescription. They went to retrieve the prescription themselves
(03:00):
and then administered the prescription or counted them out because
it was tablets.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
It wasn't injections or anything to the people that were
in the houses.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Once you were in this setup, in order to kind
of keep you there, everybody was being given a fifty
dollars payment three times a week, so one hundred and
fifty bucks to homeless people that are typically unemployedes et cetera. Yeah,
so yeah, sure, in a free house and a free housing,
(03:32):
that's right, it starts.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
To get kind of well, shady, shadier.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
I guess when you now talk to people who said
they were threatened if they weren't at the house when
the home healthcare workers stopped by, essentially saying you better
be here all the time, that was my impression.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Is that accurate?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
That's an accurate impression.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It was made clear that if you wanted to be
in the program that's what it was called, the program,
and you wanted to remain in the program, you had
to be here anytime the home health nurses or workers
were showing up to administer the medicine or the tablets
and the money was being handed out.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
So if you weren't here, you weren't going to get
your money.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
So tell me about this home healthcare agency because this
is one agency, correct.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
That's right, just one? What's it called ongoing home health care?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Okay? They started out in twenty twenty two, actually.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
Twenty nineteen, Okay, they were first formed, but they got
their licensures from Medicaid and their certification to bill around
twenty twenty two, and since.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Then their billing has gone from a couple million dollars
to twenty six million dollars.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Is that what I saw?
Speaker 4 (04:38):
That was the total collected was twenty four million over
the period of time that they've been certified, so roughly
three three and a half years.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
So the other interesting twist on this. And you've got
to read all the stories, you guys. You must read
all of these stories. There's four of them all together.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Six Oh wait, how did I miss some?
Speaker 4 (04:54):
I miss some?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I don't know, didn't turn the page.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I'll double check.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
But the church, go tell me why the same people
who own ongoing home Healthcare decided to start a branch
of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Aurora. And when
did that happen in the timeline?
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Well, it wasn't the same people they owned.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
The names are different on each segment of this whole thing,
but they're all interrelated to each other, either very close friends,
members of the same church. This is the seventh sorry,
let me think of it, Maranatha Indonesian American Seventh Day
Adventist Church. Okay, it's a legitimate title of a church.
It's incorporated. But several of the folks that were involved
(05:37):
in with the founders of ongoing home Health. It would
have been a church associate, a daughter or a son
in law, a daughter, that sort of thing. They created
the church, and the church wasn't actually meeting anywhere, didn't
have a location yet, and they may have been a
storefront type of thing, but it didn't have a permanent home.
(05:58):
And what was being done ostensibly is that the church
was providing the donation money.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
The Seventh day.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Adventist Church as a whole, part of its religious thinking
and part of its desire is to help the homeless, right,
and that's really a founding cornerstone of theirs.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
And so for this church to do that is not
quite so unusual. But for it to be tied in
with the ongoing Health is what made it quite unique,
and that's nice unique.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
That is an interesting way to put that.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
It is a unique I'll call it fraudulent, but it's
kind of genius because they did not incorporate the church.
The church didn't become a part of it until twenty
twenty four. Now here's how this looks to me. They
figured out the medicaid grift, but they needed to keep
the people in the houses. But they also wanted a
legitimate way to pay those people to take the heat
off them. That's how everything looks.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Well, that's why they were calling them donations. Ah, yes,
and the fifty dollars and everybody call it a donation.
The workers call donation. If you want your weekly donation,
you have to be here, that sort of thing. Then
at some point in time, it was originally all cash.
So several of the nurses or the workers, depending how
you look at and what they were doing, had to
stop at the bank and they were coming in with
(07:14):
stacks of fifty dollars bills and said, well, I'm tied
up at the bank.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
I can't get there yet.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
So there was a lot of text messages going back
and forth between the workers and the money and the
home health folks and the homeless folks. And the homeless
folks are like, look, I can't be there today, and said, well,
if you're not there, you're not going to get your money,
and you need to be there for the donation and
for the worker.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
That shows up.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
So as this was progressing along, then somebody realized it
was a lot easier to do this by cash app
on your cell phone, right, So rather than handle you
a fifty dollars bill or two tens or two twenties
and a ten, Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
On cash app.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
It was that cash app that allowed me essentially to
do the.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Story and to verify everything. Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
Someone can say I got paid fifty bucks, but how
do you prove that the cash app proceeds? And there
were many, many, dozens of them, to many people actually
did that, and the app receepts were very clear church donation, donation,
weekly donation. And what we did is match those APP
payments to the medicaid payment records of each person that
(08:20):
they had retrieved from the state. Anyone who receives medicaid
is allowed to get their own record, and they had
done that. I can't get it because it's Hippa protected.
So once they got that record, I was able to
combine the two together to be sure that they drived
up and said, okay, here's the donation for that particular week.
Here are three donations that they got fifty to fifty
and fifty. Sometimes they showed up only once a week
(08:41):
and got one hundred and fifty and a bunch.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
So once we piece.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
That together, then you realize the ongoing home house that's
requiring a visit to the doctor, and they're putting you
in the house.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
And then they're living in the house. Now. They said
it was owned by the church.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
It may be owned by members of the church, but
I couldn't verify that, but it was absolutely not owned
by the church itself. There are no records of any
kind to indicate the church was owner of record. That
became important as they started evicting some of the folks
who were questioning what was going on, right, and they
tell a judge, a county judge, that hey, the church
with the church and we own that house. And the
(09:17):
judge says, okay, well you've got the eviction. It's all yours.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And that eviction that's the key because the federal law
of state law, it is prohibited. You cannot bribe someone
to be on medicaid, you cannot bribe someone to use
your services. And providing a free place to live and
then threatening to take it away.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Well then you have fifty bucks's right on top of that.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
And I mean, this stinks to high heaven, David, This
absolutely stinks to high heaven. This is this is you know,
we've seen horrible abuses in Minnesota. We've seen horrible abuses
in California. It stands to reason that some kind of
fraud is happening across the country. I don't think that
we would possibly think that we'd be excluded from that.
(09:58):
So how how many people that you how many people
did you actually talked to that were part of the program.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
The ones who had lived in the houses, Yeah, well
over a dozen.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And the other stories are all consistent.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
Oh yeah, absolutely, every single one of them named the
same doctor. Everybody used the same phrasing, the program prescriptions.
I mean, the methodology was precisely the same for everybody
that's insane.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
But this is not a new grift.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
I don't understand your question.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
I mean you also have a story today about where
this grift has been done in other states.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Oh yeah, yeah, it's exploiting.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
And exploiting is a funny word because you can take
it two ways. But exploiting the homeless for a gain
out of the medicaid program is not unusual. It's been
going on around the country for quite a number of years,
and in some of them to many tens of millions
of dollars.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Is there any way from your position, because You've done
a lot of research in this. Are there any checks
and balances in the Medicaid system that should have caught
that eight unconnected adults are living in one home and
all getting the Medicaid benefits and using this home health agency?
Speaker 4 (11:03):
Well eight and one home time seven. There were seven
homes that this was going on, and that's the ones
I found out. Are there could be more, But I
don't know that right for the state to have found this.
I don't believe a person's home address is in the
Medicaid system. They may have your personal idea, your sol
security number, that sort of thing, and you have a
(11:24):
Medicaid card, so that can be redeemed anywhere in anyhow So,
I don't know that you would have known that all
these folks were in the same house. However, the one
thing that would have been consistent for them all. In
order to get this home health care, you need something
that's called a plan of care. It's an actual federal
doctument that gets filled out and says, all right, we
(11:45):
want this person to have this prescription, this type of care,
and I want me the doctor this agency to do that. Well,
in this case, that doctor the same doctor for all
of these folks signed the exact same plan of care
for this home health.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
As so he's not even doing individual plans of fake care.
Speaker 5 (12:05):
I don't mean to make it sound like they're all different,
for they are.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
But he's also the medical director.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
I didn't know that and there wasn't any paperwork to
reflect that until I interviewed the administrator of his clinic,
who happens to be his son, had told me that
he's the medical director.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
And I said, all right, what is the home health agency? Said?
Speaker 1 (12:24):
What is ongoing? Ongoing Home Health said about all of this.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Nothing.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
They were moving rather quickly through the courthouse when I
was asking those questions. Actually, they started moving more more
quickly as I started asking questions about the program. How
does it work, why does it exist? Why are people
getting payments? That sort of thing. I just wanted to
know about it, And the only response I got was
an associate who was the husband of one of the
(12:51):
founders of Ongoing Home Health, and I got a very
straightforward look and a very straightforward question, what's the problem.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Uh oh oh, stealing taxpayer dollars putting people on Medicaid
that may or may not need the medication.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
I mean come on.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
His explanation was rather straightforward. These are people getting a house,
a place to stay, and a little bit of money.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
What's the problem and threatened if they left that part out. Okay,
So where's the state on this? Please tell me that
some investigative body is now looking into this.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Based on this reporting, there.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
At least two state agencies investigating. One is the Colorado
Department of Public Health and Environment. They do licensing of
homes and businesses affiliated with Medicare and homelessness and all
that sort of things. So they're they're looking the Colorado
Department of Healthcare Policy and Finance. They're the ones that
actually administer the funding for Medicaid and Medicare and Colorado,
(13:50):
so they're digging into it. And by extension, of course,
it's a federal program, so you would presume, they said
so that the FBI would be looking in as good.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
I'm glad and I hope all these people go to jail.
I am so sick of people stealing, especially from Medicaid
that that you know, I fully understand people steal from
the government all the time because it's easy, and honestly,
people who work in the government are not as protective
of that money as they would be of their own money.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
I understand all of this, But when we're stealing from
a program that is designed to help the poorest of
the poor, disabled people, and this last legislative session we
cut spending for disabled care and we find out that
these jackasses have you know, screwed us for twenty four
million dollars. I want them all to go to jail forever.
And apparently I love the part you put in the story.
(14:38):
That's where my this is actually where my head exploded
yesterday when you talked about all their social media posts,
the owners of this company rolling in, you know, like
new cars and fabulous vacations and living high on the hog.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I as a.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Vacation of Bali.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
It was a brand new land Rover in a Tesla eleventric.
The license plate I liked on one of them was,
and I guess to show the affiliation to the church
was go O D five GFT God's gift.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
That now I want the death penalty just for the
license plate alone.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I don't. I don't.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
David mcgoil, the work is outstanding, and I mentioned yesterday,
I'm like, this is the kind of work that I
would like to see get fancy awards, and I hope
you submitted for fancy awards, and more importantly, I hope
you get to do a follow up story talking about
the arrest of these scumbags and exactly how this system
has been shut down.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Well, now the truth told.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
I mean, I'm most concerned right now with the with
the outcome of all of this is what happens for
the people if anything averse happens to this program.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
These are there are a lot of folks with no
place to go.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I would certainly hope that the housing industry that we
do have here would be able to work with them
a little more vigorously because of their cooperation on this investigation.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Yeah, my lead source on this, Kelly Swainson, was really
really concerned at the beginning of this. She was quite worried.
She understood the necessity to have this go public, but
she was also quite concerned of what would happen to
people that she'd come to call friends.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
It's about in background.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
We'll see if the state can clean up the mess
that they've kind of lewed.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
How pervasive this do you think this.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Is as far as outside of this one outfit? Yeah,
you know you had made a very good point. I mean,
there are a lot of places that try to maximize
their return on government work over the years.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
So is there something else? I don't doubt that there is.
Is it as creative as this?
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Maybe it is, and that's why we haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
At a bare minimum, I hope the outcome of your
investigating is that people start to pay attention to this,
and we find more and we finally do something actual
about waste fraud abuse.
A series of stories, one yesterday, three today by reporter
David mcgoya, uncovering what I am going to call blaytant
medical medicaid fraud.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And now he didn't call it that in the in.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
The article because he just gave the facts, as a
good journalist does. David mcgoya joins us now to talk
about this. Let's start at the beginning. How did you
even begin to dig into this story?
Speaker 3 (00:24):
We had to find out about it first. But Hi,
Mandy be back.
Speaker 4 (00:27):
I haven't seen you in a while, and I wanted
to add a footnote. I love pigs in a blanket,
but yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Everyone does.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Everyone loves pigs in a blanket. You cannot go wrong,
go wrong.
Speaker 4 (00:37):
This one came to me. Our lead story yesterday in
the Denver Gazette was a woman named Kelly Swainson. Kelly
had actually posted something on next door, the app that
neighbors talk to each other and I'm going to kind
of keep track of what's going on there, and she
basically had put out there, I've got this tale or
story about medicaid that you know, if anyone is interested
(00:58):
in knowing that kind of thing. I sent her a
note and I said you know, I'm an investigative reporter,
happy to talk to you. And it took I don't know,
three four weeks. Oh, there's back in November or so
maybe okay, And with that I just started listening to
what she was telling me and it didn't really sound
terribly unusual at first. And then as she better described
(01:20):
the homeless, the houses and all the things going on,
then it was piquing my interest.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
But not quite enough yet.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
And then when she mentioned the payments that they were receiving.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Let's not get ahead of the story yet, because the
story that she told you, and the story that you
lay out in these multiple stories, is that homeless people
are being recruited by a health agency, a home service
health agency, and they're being recruited with the promise of
lodging and not like in a shelter like that. They're
(01:52):
being housed in really nice suburban houses in Aurora, far
away from transit, far away from retail. And the old
only condition that they are given initially is that they
must be enrolled in Medicaid and they must be a
client of this home health agency.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Correct, yes, there was an addition in that.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Before that could happen, they had to go see the
very same doctor. Okay, everyone I spoke with and there
was better than a dozen of them that were part
of this program said they all had to see this
one doctor in Aurora. And it wasn't put to them
in that you need to go see this guy and
then you find your way to him.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
We're going to take you to him, oh physically, like
everybody in the car and off we go and let's
go visit the doctor.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
So there was no room for you to do it
on your own. You had to go with them, and
their prescription was gotten. You had to have a prescription
because the home health agency. What they were doing is
part of home health is they do a medicinal administration.
They count out the pills, so they made sure you
got the prescription. They went to retrieve the prescription themselves
(03:00):
and then administered the prescription or counted them out because
it was tablets.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
It wasn't injections or anything to the people that were
in the houses.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
Once you were in this setup, in order to kind
of keep you there, everybody was being given a fifty
dollars payment three times a week, so one hundred and
fifty bucks to homeless people that are typically unemployedes et cetera. Yeah,
so yeah, sure, in a free house and a free housing,
(03:32):
that's right, it starts.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
To get kind of well, shady, shadier.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
I guess when you now talk to people who said
they were threatened if they weren't at the house when
the home healthcare workers stopped by, essentially saying you better
be here all the time, that was my impression.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Is that accurate?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
That's an accurate impression.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It was made clear that if you wanted to be
in the program that's what it was called, the program,
and you wanted to remain in the program, you had
to be here anytime the home health nurses or workers
were showing up to administer the medicine or the tablets
and the money was being handed out.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
So if you weren't here, you weren't going to get
your money.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
So tell me about this home healthcare agency because this
is one agency, correct.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
That's right, just one? What's it called ongoing home health care?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Okay? They started out in twenty twenty two, actually.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
Twenty nineteen, Okay, they were first formed, but they got
their licensures from Medicaid and their certification to bill around
twenty twenty two, and since.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Then their billing has gone from a couple million dollars
to twenty six million dollars.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Is that what I saw?
Speaker 4 (04:38):
That was the total collected was twenty four million over
the period of time that they've been certified, so roughly
three three and a half years.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
So the other interesting twist on this. And you've got
to read all the stories, you guys. You must read
all of these stories. There's four of them all together.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Six Oh wait, how did I miss some?
Speaker 4 (04:54):
I miss some?
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I don't know, didn't turn the page.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I'll double check.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
But the church, go tell me why the same people
who own ongoing home Healthcare decided to start a branch
of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Aurora. And when
did that happen in the timeline?
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Well, it wasn't the same people they owned.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
The names are different on each segment of this whole thing,
but they're all interrelated to each other, either very close friends,
members of the same church. This is the seventh sorry,
let me think of it, Maranatha Indonesian American Seventh Day
Adventist Church. Okay, it's a legitimate title of a church.
It's incorporated. But several of the folks that were involved
(05:37):
in with the founders of ongoing home Health. It would
have been a church associate, a daughter or a son
in law, a daughter, that sort of thing. They created
the church, and the church wasn't actually meeting anywhere, didn't
have a location yet, and they may have been a
storefront type of thing, but it didn't have a permanent home.
(05:58):
And what was being done ostensibly is that the church
was providing the donation money.
Speaker 3 (06:06):
The Seventh day.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
Adventist Church as a whole, part of its religious thinking
and part of its desire is to help the homeless, right,
and that's really a founding cornerstone of theirs.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
And so for this church to do that is not
quite so unusual. But for it to be tied in
with the ongoing Health is what made it quite unique,
and that's nice unique.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
That is an interesting way to put that.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
It is a unique I'll call it fraudulent, but it's
kind of genius because they did not incorporate the church.
The church didn't become a part of it until twenty
twenty four. Now here's how this looks to me. They
figured out the medicaid grift, but they needed to keep
the people in the houses. But they also wanted a
legitimate way to pay those people to take the heat
off them. That's how everything looks.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Well, that's why they were calling them donations. Ah, yes,
and the fifty dollars and everybody call it a donation.
The workers call donation. If you want your weekly donation,
you have to be here, that sort of thing. Then
at some point in time, it was originally all cash.
So several of the nurses or the workers, depending how
you look at and what they were doing, had to
stop at the bank and they were coming in with
(07:14):
stacks of fifty dollars bills and said, well, I'm tied
up at the bank.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
I can't get there yet.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
So there was a lot of text messages going back
and forth between the workers and the money and the
home health folks and the homeless folks. And the homeless
folks are like, look, I can't be there today, and said, well,
if you're not there, you're not going to get your money,
and you need to be there for the donation and
for the worker.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
That shows up.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
So as this was progressing along, then somebody realized it
was a lot easier to do this by cash app
on your cell phone, right, So rather than handle you
a fifty dollars bill or two tens or two twenties
and a ten, Let's do it.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
On cash app.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
It was that cash app that allowed me essentially to
do the.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
Story and to verify everything. Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
Someone can say I got paid fifty bucks, but how
do you prove that the cash app proceeds? And there
were many, many, dozens of them, to many people actually
did that, and the app receepts were very clear church donation, donation,
weekly donation. And what we did is match those APP
payments to the medicaid payment records of each person that
(08:20):
they had retrieved from the state. Anyone who receives medicaid
is allowed to get their own record, and they had
done that. I can't get it because it's Hippa protected.
So once they got that record, I was able to
combine the two together to be sure that they drived
up and said, okay, here's the donation for that particular week.
Here are three donations that they got fifty to fifty
and fifty. Sometimes they showed up only once a week
(08:41):
and got one hundred and fifty and a bunch.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
So once we piece.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
That together, then you realize the ongoing home house that's
requiring a visit to the doctor, and they're putting you
in the house.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
And then they're living in the house. Now. They said
it was owned by the church.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
It may be owned by members of the church, but
I couldn't verify that, but it was absolutely not owned
by the church itself. There are no records of any
kind to indicate the church was owner of record. That
became important as they started evicting some of the folks
who were questioning what was going on, right, and they
tell a judge, a county judge, that hey, the church
with the church and we own that house. And the
(09:17):
judge says, okay, well you've got the eviction. It's all yours.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
And that eviction that's the key because the federal law
of state law, it is prohibited. You cannot bribe someone
to be on medicaid, you cannot bribe someone to use
your services. And providing a free place to live and
then threatening to take it away.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Well then you have fifty bucks's right on top of that.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
And I mean, this stinks to high heaven, David, This
absolutely stinks to high heaven. This is this is you know,
we've seen horrible abuses in Minnesota. We've seen horrible abuses
in California. It stands to reason that some kind of
fraud is happening across the country. I don't think that
we would possibly think that we'd be excluded from that.
(09:58):
So how how many people that you how many people
did you actually talked to that were part of the program.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
The ones who had lived in the houses, Yeah, well
over a dozen.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
And the other stories are all consistent.
Speaker 4 (10:11):
Oh yeah, absolutely, every single one of them named the
same doctor. Everybody used the same phrasing, the program prescriptions.
I mean, the methodology was precisely the same for everybody
that's insane.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
But this is not a new grift.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
I don't understand your question.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
I mean you also have a story today about where
this grift has been done in other states.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Oh yeah, yeah, it's exploiting.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
And exploiting is a funny word because you can take
it two ways. But exploiting the homeless for a gain
out of the medicaid program is not unusual. It's been
going on around the country for quite a number of years,
and in some of them to many tens of millions
of dollars.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Is there any way from your position, because You've done
a lot of research in this. Are there any checks
and balances in the Medicaid system that should have caught
that eight unconnected adults are living in one home and
all getting the Medicaid benefits and using this home health agency?
Speaker 4 (11:03):
Well eight and one home time seven. There were seven
homes that this was going on, and that's the ones
I found out. Are there could be more, But I
don't know that right for the state to have found this.
I don't believe a person's home address is in the
Medicaid system. They may have your personal idea, your sol
security number, that sort of thing, and you have a
(11:24):
Medicaid card, so that can be redeemed anywhere in anyhow So,
I don't know that you would have known that all
these folks were in the same house. However, the one
thing that would have been consistent for them all. In
order to get this home health care, you need something
that's called a plan of care. It's an actual federal
doctument that gets filled out and says, all right, we
(11:45):
want this person to have this prescription, this type of care,
and I want me the doctor this agency to do that. Well,
in this case, that doctor the same doctor for all
of these folks signed the exact same plan of care
for this home health.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
As so he's not even doing individual plans of fake care.
Speaker 5 (12:05):
I don't mean to make it sound like they're all different,
for they are.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
But he's also the medical director.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
I didn't know that and there wasn't any paperwork to
reflect that until I interviewed the administrator of his clinic,
who happens to be his son, had told me that
he's the medical director.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
And I said, all right, what is the home health agency? Said?
Speaker 1 (12:24):
What is ongoing? Ongoing Home Health said about all of this.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Nothing.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
They were moving rather quickly through the courthouse when I
was asking those questions. Actually, they started moving more more
quickly as I started asking questions about the program. How
does it work, why does it exist? Why are people
getting payments? That sort of thing. I just wanted to
know about it, And the only response I got was
an associate who was the husband of one of the
(12:51):
founders of Ongoing Home Health, and I got a very
straightforward look and a very straightforward question, what's the problem.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Uh oh oh, stealing taxpayer dollars putting people on Medicaid
that may or may not need the medication.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
I mean come on.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
His explanation was rather straightforward. These are people getting a house,
a place to stay, and a little bit of money.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
What's the problem and threatened if they left that part out. Okay,
So where's the state on this? Please tell me that
some investigative body is now looking into this.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Based on this reporting, there.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
At least two state agencies investigating. One is the Colorado
Department of Public Health and Environment. They do licensing of
homes and businesses affiliated with Medicare and homelessness and all
that sort of things. So they're they're looking the Colorado
Department of Healthcare Policy and Finance. They're the ones that
actually administer the funding for Medicaid and Medicare and Colorado,
(13:50):
so they're digging into it. And by extension, of course,
it's a federal program, so you would presume, they said
so that the FBI would be looking in as good.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
I'm glad and I hope all these people go to jail.
I am so sick of people stealing, especially from Medicaid
that that you know, I fully understand people steal from
the government all the time because it's easy, and honestly,
people who work in the government are not as protective
of that money as they would be of their own money.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
I get it.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
I understand all of this, But when we're stealing from
a program that is designed to help the poorest of
the poor, disabled people, and this last legislative session we
cut spending for disabled care and we find out that
these jackasses have you know, screwed us for twenty four
million dollars. I want them all to go to jail forever.
And apparently I love the part you put in the story.
(14:38):
That's where my this is actually where my head exploded
yesterday when you talked about all their social media posts,
the owners of this company rolling in, you know, like
new cars and fabulous vacations and living high on the hog.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
I as a.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Vacation of Bali.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
It was a brand new land Rover in a Tesla eleventric.
The license plate I liked on one of them was,
and I guess to show the affiliation to the church
was go O D five GFT God's gift.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
That now I want the death penalty just for the
license plate alone.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
I don't. I don't.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
David mcgoil, the work is outstanding, and I mentioned yesterday,
I'm like, this is the kind of work that I
would like to see get fancy awards, and I hope
you submitted for fancy awards, and more importantly, I hope
you get to do a follow up story talking about
the arrest of these scumbags and exactly how this system
has been shut down.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Well, now the truth told.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
I mean, I'm most concerned right now with the with
the outcome of all of this is what happens for
the people if anything averse happens to this program.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
These are there are a lot of folks with no
place to go.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
I would certainly hope that the housing industry that we
do have here would be able to work with them
a little more vigorously because of their cooperation on this investigation.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Yeah, my lead source on this, Kelly Swainson, was really
really concerned at the beginning of this. She was quite worried.
She understood the necessity to have this go public, but
she was also quite concerned of what would happen to
people that she'd come to call friends.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
It's about in background.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
We'll see if the state can clean up the mess
that they've kind of lewed.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
How pervasive this do you think this.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Is as far as outside of this one outfit? Yeah,
you know you had made a very good point. I mean,
there are a lot of places that try to maximize
their return on government work over the years.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
So is there something else? I don't doubt that there is.
Is it as creative as this?
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Maybe it is, and that's why we haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
At a bare minimum, I hope the outcome of your
investigating is that people start to pay attention to this,
and we find more and we finally do something actual
about waste fraud abuse.
The Mandy Connell Podcast News
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