Transparency Is Public Safety: Medicaid Oversight and Honest Governance Matter

Originally published by Townhall

On March 7, 2025, 39-year-old Rick Clemmer was found dead in his East Side St. Paul, Minnesota apartment after several days without contact from medical providers paid to oversee his care. The medical examiner attributed his death to an enlarged heart. But for his mother, Mickey Clemmer, that explanation left the most troubling question unanswered: how did a man enrolled in a Medicaid-funded program designed to provide daily supervision end up entirely alone?

Rick Clemmer had long struggled with severe mental illness and substance-use disorder. For most of his adult life, he lived in regulated environments where court-ordered treatment plans and routine monitoring helped keep him stable. In the summer of 2024, he transitioned to independent housing through Minnesota’s Integrated Community Supports (ICS) program—a Medicaid benefit intended to provide daily, one-on-one assistance with medication adherence, safety checks, meal preparation, and basic household management for individuals with complex behavioral health needs.

According to reported billing records, his provider, Ultimate Home Health Services LLC, charged Medicaid roughly $462 per day—equivalent to about 12 hours of care. That is more than double the average daily Medicaid expenditure per beneficiary in Minnesota. Yet according to family accounts, those services were never delivered. Clemmer died unnoticed while payments continued. His mother has described the episode not as a paperwork failure, but as abandonment financed by taxpayer dollars.

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