I was in Columbus last month. We saw it. I pulled a U turn through the parking lot of a child learing center on Cleveland Ave that had few signs of life, grass growing long and trash littered all around the building. When you began looking around the area, the signs were everywhere.

As people have realized the United States government will pay them to hang out with their own families, northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaced by businesses that bill Medicaid. And Columbus, a city with the second largest Somali population in the country, has become, on the surface, the most unhealthy city on the planet.

“Well if the government is going to pay you to do it,” one home health operator told me. “People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.”

The new welfare queens aren’t the recipients whose low incomes qualify them for poverty programs. They’re the companies getting rich off them.

Driving down Cleveland Avenue, in less than 40 seconds you come across endless home health companies. Capital Home Health; Continental Home Health; Dynamic Home Healthcare; Ohio Senior Home Healthcare. Entire buildings throughout the city are filled entirely with what appear to be identical businesses.[…]

Pick the owner of a Columbus home health care company at random and look him up in public records, and you are likely to go down an endless rabbit hole: years of unpaid taxes and debts, sometimes criminal records, and an astonishing number of LLCs created in other industries, as if the millions they make from Medicaid are just a side gig.

Thankfully, such a thing could never happen here.