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Boom in Autism Therapy Is ‘Medicaid’s Fastest-Growing Jackpot’ – Twitchy

March 21, 2026

One thing we learned when the fake Somali daycare scandal in Minnesota hit was that the Trump administration’s investigation into fraud in the state nailed a pair of autism therapy providers operated by members of Minneapolis’s Somali community that collected $20 million in Medicaid payments for services not rendered. This story from The Wall Street Journal was published on March 10, but the paper re-upped the piece on X on Saturday. It doesn’t focus on Somalis, but it does blow the lid off of Medicaid fraud related to autism diagnoses.

She charged $29 million to treat just 84 kids. The boom in autism therapy is Medicaid’s fastest-growing jackpot. https://t.co/zFrlf4uaAY

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 21, 2026

The Wall Street Journal reports:

When Meghann Mitchell first launched her autism-therapy business in 2019, she took aim at an unlikely source of profit: Indiana’s taxpayer-funded Medicaid program, the public insurance system for the poor.

The bet paid off. In 2023, the state paid Mitchell’s company, Piece by Piece Autism Centers, $29 million to provide therapy to just 84 patients—about $340,000 a child—according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid billing records.

That amount surpassed what Indiana Medicaid typically spends in a year treating a newly diagnosed lung-cancer patient or covering a year of nursing-home care.

Piece by Piece became one of Medicaid’s most expensive providers in part by raising its prices, triggering reimbursements as high as $640 an hour for routine therapy that can be administered by workers with little more than a high-school diploma. Its highest payments were more than 10 times higher than the nation’s average.

Mitchell said her company complied with Indiana’s rules and the state never objected to her prices.

“I don’t think Indiana really had any oversight, or not much,” said Mitchell, who bought a series of properties, including a $2.5 million home on Florida’s Sanibel Island and a $600,000 waterfront house on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana, while her company’s Medicaid billings soared.