Unmasking the Nursing Home Executives Behind Ohio's Medicaid Caregiver Crackdown

HB-795: Vivek Ramaswamy took their money. Disabled Ohioans will pay.

Right now, several government officials in Ohio are pushing to end the use of Medicaid waivers that allow disabled children and adults to stay at home with their caregivers.

Before anything else, there is something you need to understand. It began with half-truths, disinformation, and a manufactured enemy of their choosing.

The men behind this bill — Josh Williams, Vivek Ramaswamy, Matt Huffman and Rob McColley — are using the ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ playbook.

The same one used to justify DOGE which accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data on millions of Americans on unsafe servers. The same tactic deployed during the Minnesota ICE crackdowns disguised as daycare fraud enforcement.

Matt Huffman runs the Ohio House. Rob McColley runs the Ohio Senate. McColley is Ramaswamy’s running mate. He stood next to Ramaswamy at the May 19 press conference that kicked off the broader Medicaid crackdown.

Now Vice President JD Vance’s White House “Anti-Fraud Task Force” and Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy have launched a coordinated crackdown on alleged widespread Medicaid fraud in Ohio.

Republicans have controlled Ohio state government since 2011. If there's fraud in the system, they made the system. If the system has weak oversight, they wrote the oversight.

Ramaswamy and Vance have been friends since they attended Yale Law together nearly 2 decades ago.

This specific flavor of fraud accusation started when right-wing newspaper Daily Wire reporter Luke Rosiak told his readers that Ohio’s home care waivers, “actually pay people to ‘hang out’ with their own family members.”

Hang out.

As if suctioning a life-long breathing tube is just hanging out. As if initiating a peg tube feeding is how families spend a casual Saturday night. As if crushing medications, managing equipment, monitoring vitals, and keeping another human being alive is something you’d describe to a neighbor over the fence as a good time.

And these family caregivers make $12 to $18 an hour.

This bill is makes it seem like caregivers are pocketing millions. The reality is that a single parent in Ohio needs to make $38 an hour just to cover housing, food, and medical care for one child. Caregivers under this program top out at $18.

They aren’t even making a living wage.

That did not stop Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — a Trump endorsed Republican and former DOGE member himself — from putting Rosiak on his campaign stage to tell more people the same lie. Just days ago Luke Rosiak testified before U.S. House Oversight Committee task force on Ohio Medicaid waiver fraud, federalizing the narrative.

Ohio House Hill 795 was born on March 25th, 2026. They gave it a name designed to make you feel safe. The SHIELD Act. It stands for Safeguarding Healthcare Integrity through Electronic Location Data.

The bill was introduced a month It came a month before the Rosiak article ever did. Almost like the article was written to lobby the bill.

Ohio House Bill 795 is a proposed Medicaid ‘anti-fraud measure’ that would impose strict new surveillance rules on home health providers and constructively force individuals into nursing care facilities.

HB-795 was introduced by Ohio Rep. Josh Williams, a Republican who represents Ohio House District 44.

He is the primary sponsor of this bill. Although the areas Josh represents are small to the Ohio caucus, he sure is introducing a lot of bills that would help the rich and harm the rest of us here.

In fact, Josh Williams has introduced over 100 pieces of legislation since January 2025, setting a record for the most bills introduced in a single General Assembly in Ohio history.

Interestingly, Josh Williams dropped out of high school at 18, fell more than thirty feet on a job site, and spent six years disabled, going through surgery after surgery before he could finish his education. He survived all of that, experienced it struggle first-hand, and chose to write this bill anyway.

The bill is long and full of technical language, so, let’s be precise about just some of what HB-795 actually does to 7,000+ Ohio families.

1. Every home caregiver must now clock in and out with GPS tracking, movements captured throughout every visit.

2. It hands the state of Ohio the power to freeze a caregivers Medicaid waiver payments on suspicion alone. They don’t need proof. One day a family could just wake up to a stopped check and a disabled person without care.

   1. This means the moment a caregiver becomes inconvenient, the moment a family pushes back, asks too many questions, or refuses to comply disabled people become the leverage.

3. The state alone gets to decide how much care time a disabled person is allowed per task, and decides when to reassess and cut it. There is no guaranteed minimum.

4. It forces families to re-certify (prove) their need for care every 90 days, because in Josh Williams and Vivek Ramaswamys Ohio, disability is apparently a condition that expires.

This bill makes Ohio families prove their need for care every 90 days, but it says nothing about nursing homes. Under current Ohio law, nursing homes only have to recertify every 3 years.

What a strange and convenient coincidence.

An earlier version outright banned Medicaid from paying any family member caring for a disabled loved one. When that sparked public outcry, they removed it without announcement, but everything else is still there and it still gives the people in power enough ammunition to force people into nursing homes.

And here’s what many of those nursing homes look like for those who live there

What those nursing homes need are better conditions. Not more residents.

This is where HB-795 sends them. Out of homes where their own families are paid to keep them safe. Into facilities where neglect is the rule, abuse is a coin flip, the fines don’t bite, the staff is gone by next year, and when the money runs out, they leave you on the sidewalk.

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But to truly understand the full picture, we have to look at who funded the men who made this possible.

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The Sprenger Family

Based on political finance records, the largest individual donor to this cause appears to be Scott Sprenger.

He is the former President and CEO of Sprenger Health Care Systems, a 65-year-old family-owned senior care company headquartered in Lorain, Ohio.

The company operates 13 nursing homes, 12 assisted living communities, and 8 independent living communities across Ohio, Indiana, and South Carolina, with nearly 2,000 beds, 2,000 employees, and roughly $322 million in annual revenue. In recent years, he stepped aside as CEO to make way for Nicole Sprenger, the current CEO and a third-generation operator. She has since stepped aside for Shannon Kuhn.

Scott now spends his time sitting on the Board of Directors for an organization known as the Ohio Health Care Association (OHCA), the state’s largest nursing home trade group.

OHCA runs a political action committee, which is a fundraising arm built to collect money from industry executives and route it to politicians.

It’s called the Ohio Health Care Association PAC and it’s spent over $140,000 on political donations in 2026 alone, it’s primarily funded by personal checks from wealthy nursing home chain owners, like the Sprenger family.

Here’s how the Sprenger money moved this year.

Scott Sprenger gave $15,000 to the OHCA PAC, plus a separate $10,000 directly to Vivek Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial campaign. Nicole Sprenger gave an additional $7,500 to the OHCA PAC. The OHCA PAC then donated $7,500 to Ramaswamy — who is one of their top payees.

So, Vivek Ramaswamy received $17,500 from a single nursing home family while publicly pushing for HB-795, the bill that would ban Medicaid payments to family caregivers and push disabled Ohioans into facilities owned by people like the Sprengers.

The OHCA nursing home PAC also paid:

Josh Williams, Representative That Introduced the Bill: $2,500.

Matt Huffman, Speaker of the Ohio House: $20,000

Rob McColley, the President of the Ohio Senate: $17,000

The two largest checks on the PAC’s entire payee list went to the two men who decide whether this bill becomes law. They threw a little change to the man who helped make it happen, too, of course.

Campaign finance records show that the OHCA PAC also paid Republican state legislators Nick Santucci ($7,000), Jerry Cirino ($6,000), Monica Robb Blasdel ($5,250), Jeannette Schmidt ($5,000), and Theresa Gavarone ($4,000).

If HB-795 passes, even a fraction of the 7,000 displaced Ohio families will mean new nursing home placements at the steep price of ~$8,000 to $10,000 per resident per month.

The Sprengers own 13 of those very facilities in Ohio. Every disabled person shoved out of their family’s home and into a Sprenger bed is worth roughly $100,000 a year in Medicaid billing.

To put it all together for you, one family making $322 million a year spent a mere $32,500 of it on “political donations” in 2026. If HB-795 passes, they’ll make that back in weeks and can potentially make millions for years.

The Ohio taxpayer foots the bill.

Disabled Ohioans and their loved ones pay the price.

Vivek brands himself as the billionaire outsider who can’t be bought because he is self-funded with his own $25 million self-loan and small-dollar donors. Nursing home industry money in his campaign account sure says otherwise.

But of course, these were not the only wealthy executives who donated to a group who lobbied for this.

The OHCA PAC’s top contributors read like a who’s who of Ohio’s nursing home industry, and the OHCA Board seems as if it is paying itself to pass this bill. Of the major individual donors to the OHCA PAC in 2026, at least four are current officers or directors on the OHCA Board itself.

Gerald Schroer Jr. of The Schroer Group / Altercare gave $10,700 to HCOA. He gave another $15,000.00 to Vivek Ramaswamy directly.

Bill Weisberg and Benjamin Volpe of Saber Healthcare Group each gave $10,000.

Chris Chirumbolo of Carespring Health Care Management gave $10,000

Joe Cilone of JCTH Holdings / Inspira Health Group gave $10,000.

Every donor on this list owns or runs nursing homes that stand to absorb the disabled Ohioans this bill would displace. And they’re all board members of the PAC that they use to lobby in ways that make that happen.

If you haven’t caught onto the pattern yet, what gets sold as a righteous cause is usually a marketing campaign from for their own self interests. And it’s always the same group of people.

They sell you anger by pointing at someone supposedly taking from you. Meanwhile, they’re the ones taking, for themselves and their friends.

Propaganda scholars call this Accusation in a Mirror. You accuse your opponents of the exact crimes you’re committing. It was used to fuel the Rwandan genocide and Nazi Germany.

Let’s not fall for the propaganda. Let’s follow this money together.

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I do not get tens of thousands in donations from ultra rich corporations and government friends. I am just a regular gal writing on the real issues and investigating what needs to be investigated.

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