Gov. John Kasich's plan for rooting out fraud in Ohio's publicly funded home health-care industry relies more heavily on certified agencies while scaling back on independent providers. The state would like to do business primarily with the 800 Medicare-certified home healthcare agencies in Ohio as well as the more than 80 agencies that have been accredited in other ways. But if that plan moves forward, the state will remain at risk of doing business with dozens of poorly run agencies. In the federal fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, Ohio had far more Medicare-certified home health-care agencies with serious deficiencies than any other state, according to a government database obtained by The Dispatch through a public-records request.
