Colorado Medicaid Program Looks Like Compassion Theater

The Gazette’s David Migoya is back with another Colorado Watch story on “the program,” the alleged Aurora-based homelessness-and-Medicaid pipeline where vulnerable people were offered housing and “donations” from a church while becoming clients of a home health agency that billed Medicaid millions. This installment centers on Stephanie Swabacker, a medically fragile 51-year-old woman using a wheelchair and oxygen, who said she was drawn in by the promise of stable housing, cash, and help.

And all of this stinks to high heaven. It just stinks. The Gazette reports that On Going Home Health Care has been paid nearly $24 million by Medicaid since it was certified to bill for services, though it remains unclear how much of that was tied to the homeless health care program. Swabacker’s records, according to the Gazette, showed Medicaid payments for her “home care” beginning at about $915 a week plus a second $290 weekly charge, later rising to $1,530 a week after she moved into the Rome Street house. By then, the Gazette reports, On Going HHC was billing Medicaid about $7,000 a month while Swabacker said she was mainly having pills dispensed.

This is exactly the species of waste, fraud, and abuse the Trump administration has been trying to drag into daylight. If investigators prove wrongdoing here, taxpayers should get answers, money should be clawed back, and people who exploited the vulnerable should face consequences with teeth. Because this was not just a budget line. These were people.

The Bullet Point Brief

• Swabacker said she was told “the program” offered free housing if she got a prescription and had someone count it out for her, as long as she was on Medicaid. That is not a care model. That sounds like a billing model wearing a thrift-store halo.
• The Gazette reports homeless participants were offered housing and $150 in weekly “donations” while becoming clients of On Going Home Health Care, which billed Medicaid millions. Compassion becomes camouflage, the pipe fills with public money, and the people at the bottom are told to be grateful for the bucket.
• Swabacker said she was taken to see Dr. Arthur Ferrer, received multiple prescriptions, and then met home health workers at a McDonald’s, where they took her blood pressure, temperature, dispensed pills, and gave her $50. Medicaid billing for that level of “care” should make every taxpayer’s eye twitch.
• The Gazette tied ownerships and relationships among On Going HHC, Maranatha Indonesian-American Seventh Day Adventist Church, and Better Living, the company that said it operated the houses. Residents said the lines were often fuzzy between who was handling medication and who was tied to church “donations.” Fuzzy lines are great for watercolor. Not Medicaid.
• Participants described little to nothing resembling real upward help: no drug or alcohol counseling, no job training, no therapy, no meetings, no classes, and no real program beyond housing, donations, and pill counting. Swabacker put it plainly: there were “no programs, no classes, no paperwork,” and “they just wanted us to stay at home.”

My Bottom Line

I truly feel for the people pulled into this. Stephanie Swabacker, Stacey Fellows, Kelli Swainson, Jeremy Stout, Lisa Francis, Taylor Bellah, Gage Butler and others in this story were not the problem. They were the product being processed. Disabled, homeless, broke, medically fragile, addicted, isolated, desperate for shelter, and then fed into something that sounded like salvation on a brochure and looks a hell of a lot uglier once the billing starts.

This is Colorado’s homelessness-and-Medicaid machine doing what these machines always seem to do: wrapping itself in compassion language while public money gushes through the pipes to the people running the damn thing. The suffering becomes the sales pitch. The vulnerable become the moral hostage. And anyone asking basic questions gets treated like they hate the poor instead of like they are trying to find out who got paid.

Colorado’s ruling class keeps telling taxpayers that if we just fund one more compassionate system, the suffering will shrink. Then stories like this come along and show the nightmare version: the suffering becomes the business model. Housing becomes bait. Medicaid becomes the ATM. “Donations” become glue. And accountability wanders off somewhere with a clipboard and a pension.

The adult questions are simple. Who got paid? How much? For what services? What outcomes were produced? Who approved the billing? Who monitored the providers? Who noticed the same names and connected entities circling the same homeless people and Medicaid dollars? And why does it take a newspaper investigation to make state government look under the hood?

This is a travesty for Colorado taxpayers and a gut punch for the people allegedly used as invoices with a pulse. If this is what compassion looks like after the consultants, providers, agencies, churches, companies, and regulators are done with it, then maybe Colorado needs less compassion theater and more audits, subpoenas, clawbacks, prosecutions where warranted, and a very long look at the poverty-service ecosystem turning misery into recurring revenue.

Source: The Gazette