Ohio’s Auditor Found Millionaires On Medicaid and They Were Not Even the Worst Part

Minnesota fraudsters stole 250 million dollars from a federal program meant to feed hungry children.

Ohio Auditor Keith Faber went hunting for the same kind of rot inside his state's Medicaid program.

His team found millionaires collecting benefits, and that turned out to be the least disturbing thing in the report.

Faber's Auditors Pulled 1,500 Files and Kept Finding People Who Did Not Belong

Faber released his interim review on September 22, 2026, and it zeroed in on Ohio's Medicaid program for the aged, blind and disabled.

That program covers 498,885 people.

Auditors pulled a sample of 1,500 enrollees and found 49 of them – about 3 percent – had no business being on the rolls.

Most of the people auditors checked belonged there, and that is exactly why the rest should make every taxpayer furious.

Twenty-five of the ineligible enrollees failed one simple test: they had too much money.

Three of them were sitting on more than $1 million apiece.

Millionaires, on a program built for poor, disabled and elderly Ohioans who have nowhere else to turn.

Those 25 people alone collected $356,541 in benefits, roughly $7,000 a head.

Now do the math on 3 percent of nearly 500,000 enrollees.

That's roughly 15,000 people across Ohio who should not be there.

"The taxpayers of this state should not be footing the bill for millionaires and others who have adequate means to pay their own way," Faber said.

He put it even more bluntly in a second line: "Every dollar they spend on people who aren't eligible for public resources is a dollar that's not helping the truly needy among us."

More Than 3,000 Dead Ohioans Were Still On the Books

The millionaires grab the headline.

The dead people should grab your wallet.

Auditors found 3,172 deceased Ohioans still enrolled in the program.

Nearly $1.8 million in benefits went out on their behalf.

This is not a one-time glitch, either.

Faber's statewide audit in March 2026 turned up payments for dead beneficiaries and an error rate of roughly 15.6 percent in the Medicaid cases auditors sampled.

Spread across the whole program, that works out to somewhere between $800 million and $4.4 billion in possible improper spending.

Faber warned that "weaknesses in the Ohio Department of Medicaid systems" open the door to "fraud, waste and abuse."

The problems his team listed are almost boring in how basic they are – eligibility reviews that rarely happen, outdated application forms, and automatic "ex parte" renewals that roll people forward without anyone checking whether they still qualify.

Rea Hederman of the Buckeye Institute pointed to Ohio's "pay and chase" model, which sends the check first and tries to claw the money back later.

Fraudsters love that system for one reason: by the time the state starts chasing, the money is long gone.

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill Forces States to Stop Paying the Dead

Ohio is not alone, and Washington finally noticed.

The Health and Human Services inspector general found more than $207.5 million in managed care payments made on behalf of dead enrollees nationwide between July 2021 and July 2022 – on Joe Biden's watch.

Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill goes straight at the problem.

Starting January 1, 2027, every state has to check its Medicaid rolls against the Social Security Death Master File every quarter and remove the dead.

The same law requires eligibility checks every six months for Medicaid expansion enrollees, a change the Congressional Budget Office estimates saves $58 billion over ten years.

It also caps the home equity exemption for long-term care at $1 million starting in 2028.

The typical family home is nowhere near that line – but a millionaire can no longer hide a fortune in a mansion and send taxpayers the nursing home bill.

Not one Democrat in the House or Senate voted for that bill.

Hakeem Jeffries branded it "the largest cut to Medicaid in American history."

Faber just showed Ohio who slips through when nobody checks.

It is not the widow scraping by on Social Security.

It is the millionaire gaming the asset rules, and the dead name on a list nobody bothered to update.

The Buckeye Institute's Greg Lawson said "recent Medicaid reforms passed back in the summer should help" – and Ohio taxpayers should hold the state to that promise.

Faber's final report is still coming.

If the interim numbers look like this, Ohioans deserve to know how deep the hole really goes.

Sources:

• David Beasley, "Review finds millionaires on Ohio's Medicaid roles," The Center Square via Just the News, September 22, 2026.
• Ohio Auditor of State, "State Auditor: Thousands of ineligible Ohioans enrolled in Medicaid programs," Knox Pages, September 22, 2026.
• Ohio Auditor of State, "Annual State of Ohio Single Audit Details $45 Billion in Spending Through 371 Federally Funded Programs," Ohio Auditor of State, March 27, 2026.
• Fatima Hussein, "Medicaid paid more than $200 million to dead people, and Trump is rewriting privacy laws to fix it," Associated Press via Fortune, December 23, 2025.
• Chris Medrano, Brian Blase and Ryan Long, "What Made It Into Law: Health Provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill," Paragon Health Institute, July 10, 2025.
• Office of Leader Hakeem Jeffries, "Leader Jeffries: One Year Ago, Republicans Enacted the Largest Cut to Medicaid in American History," Office of Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, June 29, 2026.
• US Department of Justice, "U.S. Attorney Announces Federal Charges Against 47 Defendants in $250 Million Feeding Our Future Fraud Scheme," US Department of Justice, September 2022.