Inside Ohio’s Home Health Empire: 7 Buildings, 288 Medicaid Companies, $250 Million

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The seven buildings along East Dublin Granville Road in Columbus, Ohio, are filled with hundreds of office suites, all owned by a company named Cordoba Real Estate. A large majority of the tenants in the buildings bill Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded medical program for the impoverished, as a “home health care” business that provides low-skilled, usually non-medical care to elderly or disabled people.

The Daily Wire has spent weeks analyzing Medicaid data released by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency in an effort to weed out wasteful government spending. The buildings owned by Cordoba stuck out, each housing dozens of businesses that bill Medicaid.

In all, the Cordoba-owned buildings in Columbus housed 288 businesses registered with Medicaid, The Daily Wire investigation found. Together, they charged taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars between 2018 and 2024. That’s in a city where only 6,273 people 75 or older are on Medicaid.

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Ohio has 3,700 companies with “Home Health” in their name, according to a review of Ohio business records. In particular, it’s blown up in Columbus, which is home to the second-largest Somali population in the United States. {snip}

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Yet the home health businesses have been established as if by a machine, with some sharing nearly identical signs that suggest coordination rather than rivalry.

One sign for National Home Health Care Services LLC explained that the home Medicaid businesses often don’t provide healthcare at all; they provide services like “companionship & conversation” and “light housekeeping.” Next to it hung a sign proclaiming “we are on break right now.”

Another sign for Guidance Home Health Care LLC was graphically identical, even with the same slogan: “Your Peace of Mind in Home Health Care.” Only the phone number was different.

At one Cordoba building, I finally located a rare home health business with someone in it: GC Home Healthcare LLC. Asked how he recruits employees, Abid, the owner’s son, said employees and patients come as a package: in 70% of cases, the employees are being paid to spend time with their own family members, he explained.

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The family member of an elderly person isn’t set up to bill Medicaid, so a company stands in the middle. “We’re taking a small cut because [Medicaid] pay us and we pay them their hours,” Abid explained.

He said the number of hours depends on the doctor’s recommendation, but it is often an hour a day. “You expect them to take time off work to take care of their relatives, there has to be some sort of benefit,” he added.

Asked why people wouldn’t simply help their aging parents without billing Medicaid, he said, “Well if the government will pay you to do it … it’s an incentive. I think most people nowadays, they don’t really care as much.”

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Inside this Cordoba property at 5900 Roche Drive, many of the businesses have signs saying the employees are on break — but there are indications that might be a ruse.

It’s clear that no one has been entering JLL Home Healthcare LLC, where the door doesn’t even have a doorknob. It’s adorned with a “Sorry We’re Closed” sign and features the bizarre slogan, “Steaming To Assist.”

It was incorporated by Kofi Adoma, who also owns a trucking business called JLL Transportation & Logistics, records show.

Down the hall at 1st Choice Home Health Care LLC, when we visited there was an envelope sitting by the door, postmarked five months prior, from the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

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At 2700 East Dublin, there are 80 companies that collectively billed at least $73 million to Medicaid and received $23 million from the state of Ohio. Eleven billed more than $1 million.

Two claim Suite A alone: Continental Home Health Care, Inc., led by Dequa Mohamed, which, according to government records, billed $15 million, and Dynamic Home Health Care, owned by Said Ahmed, who the government paid $10 million. Bernard Konadu’s Buckeye Health Agency charged $15 million, according to the records. An audit found that it billed the government for visiting people at home when that was highly unlikely, because the same people were simultaneously in the hospital.

Down the hall is Omega Home Health Care Services, which charged taxpayers $11 million between December 2017 and October 2024, the time period for which data is publicly available.

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Omega was incorporated in 2011 by Mohamud A. Jama, a Democratic politician. Jama founded a newspaper called the Somali Post and a Somali coffee house, and has been affiliated with the Somali Education Resource Center, which also received $6 million in federal dollars in 2023, all on top of raising nine children and working as an engineer.

When he ran for state senate as the Democrat nominee in 2024, the multimillion-dollar home health business didn’t even get a mention in his biography.

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Instead of concrete repercussions, the auditor simply recommended that Omega refund $1,000 to cover the cases where Medicaid’s own data proved the impossibility of home visits. As for the millions of dollars in other claims, the program would simply take Omega’s word for it.

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The man from Ultra Logistics LLC was immediately irate and said, “The owner is not right here … Why are you guys looking special for only Somalians? Why do you knock on only Somalian doors?”

Told the reporters were knocking on all doors with taxpayer payments in home health, he sneered, “Journalist? Who cares, journalist …You guys don’t pay our bills.”

“Blah blah blah blah, we don’t need you guys. We know people to talk to,” he said. “I’m going to tell everybody you guys are racist people.”

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