Refugees From Bhutan Billed Medicaid Millions. Now They Drink Champagne In Private Jets.

This is part five of “Medicaid Millions,” a Daily Wire series exposing billions of dollars in dubious “home health” payments where people are paid to spend time with their own relatives.

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A 29-year old former refugee in Ohio named Roshan Adhikari has become a social media sensation in Bhutan and Nepal, where many Bhutanese refugees lived, by documenting his life of garish luxury. In January, he advertised a vanity film starring himself, and showed himself gifting a “small birthday surprise for Dad”: a new Cadillac Escalade, plus a Mercedes for mom.

Another post showed him drinking champagne in a private jet, with the caption: “Welcome Aboard AIR ROSHAN. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that a kid born in Nepal would one day reach the skies like this.”

How did Roshan make his dreams come true? He is chief operating officer of Centerlight Home Care LLC in Cleveland, a home health company that bills Medicaid. His father, Khadananda Adhikari, owns the company, which lacks so much as a website, but has been paid nearly $17 million by the state of Ohio in recent years, according to data analyzed by The Daily Wire.

His 25-year old brother, Dickson Adhikari, has his own Medicaid company, Changing Lives Home Care LLC, which was paid $10 million by Ohio. Roshan also owns Smile Transport LLC, the kind of company that drives the elderly to the doctor.

There is little indication from Roshan’s social media that he spends much time working on these businesses in Ohio. Most of his posts are made from Nepal or from resorts in places like Miami.

Eighty-one percent of immigrants from the nation of Bhutan are on welfare, according to a graphic posted by President Donald Trump, the highest of any immigrant population in the country. Ohio, and specifically its capital city of Columbus, has the largest Bhutanese population in the world outside of Bhutan. It appears that some members of the 19% who are not on welfare may be drafting financiall off the many who are taking government money.

In Ohio alone, people with the last name Adhikari, a Bhutanese name, have been paid more than $350 million by the government for operating home health and adult daycare businesses, a Daily Wire analysis of Medicaid and Ohio spending records found.

The money from just that one clan, in just one state, amounts to about 10% of the annual GDP of the south Asian nation.

The Facebook page of Roshan Adhikari’s father, who did not return a request for comment, says he is employed as a translator for Catholic Charities. Business records show he also owns a run-down convenience store which has failed to pay state taxes every year since 2022. He separately has tax liens against him personally for failing to pay Cuyahoga County taxes.

Yet taxpayers have certainly been paying him. So handsomely that in 2023, Roshan and his father incorporated Lux Charters LLC.

Reached by The Daily Wire, Roshan said he could not talk because he was getting on an international flight. When we called back a few days later, he hung up as soon as I introduced myself.

Refugee Idol

Some of the Medicaid millions are leaving the country. Individual home health care companies have affiliate charities which can funnel money abroad, all while providing tax benefits.

One home health company, the Himalayan Care Center, has been paid $346,000 by Ohio. It shares an address with its “partner” group, the Kalyan Foundation, which on its website shows food being delivered to Nepal out of a warehouse with its banner on it.

Kalyan Foundation

In another example, former refugee Dilli Ram Adhikari owns three home health care companies that have collectively been paid a quarter billion dollars by Medicaid in recent years: Americare Healthcare Services in Blacklick, Ohio; Intra-National Home Care in Etna, Ohio; and Serenity Home Health Agency in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. (In January 2025, Americare was ordered to pay $15 million after the Department of Labor said it underpaid workers.)

Dilli also owns millions of dollars worth of real estate, such as a building in St. Paul, Minnesota, that houses Diversity Adult Day Care and the Bhutanese Community Organization of Minnesota. He founded A1 Lending alongside Baris Adhikari, who himself “attained early success through the establishment of a flourishing home care business” in Pennsylvania.

No one answered the phone or replied to voicemails at several companies connected to Dilli.

Dilli’s businesses share an office with the Association of Nepali Origin, which says it provides “humanitarian assistance and relief efforts.”

Dilli also created a nonprofit called the Intra National Welfare and Support Foundation, which hosts two American Idol-like television shows that involve the president of Nepal.

The winners receive 10 million rupees, equivalent to $65,000 – about what a single Bhutanese person in Ohio can get paid by Medicaid for working in home health and providing services like “companionship & conversation.”

A Nepalese news outlet wrote that “these reality shows are giving a tangible form to the dream of the Foundation’s Chairman, Dilli Adhikari, of uniting Nepali communities worldwide.”

Although that article is from last May, there is no record of annual tax filings from the foundation since 2020, when it reported nearly half a million dollars in revenue and said it didn’t send any abroad.

Remarkably, Intra National Welfare is not the only “charity” linked to Ohio Medicaid that reported sending money overseas to fund a singing-competition reality show. The Nakshatra Foundation – connected to Bravo Health Care LLC, which Ohio paid $589,000 – did the same, and also says it is funding a school system in Nepal.

An entire infrastructure propping up the third-world nation of Bhutan is now directly tied to Bhutanese refugees in the United States claiming to be disabled, triggering payments to their family members.

The Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization, which reports $2.5 million in assets, is based in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. Its chairman is Narad Adhikari and its president is Kamal Dhimal, who founded a company called Melody Care that billed Medicaid $9 million.

When the Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization held a massive event last July, so many of its attendees owned Medicaid companies that they “offered their company vans and buses as shuttles.”

All of the donors mentioned in an article about the event made their money from Medicaid or adult day care. Those include “Tika Adhikari, a Kentucky-based donor and owner of Freedom Daycare LLC and Freedom Home Health.” Tika Adhikari is listed on the incorporation paperwork for Freedom Senior Share LLC in that state, which billed Medicaid $143 million.

The Bhutanese foundation’s donors also included Netra Acharya, “a Pennsylvania-based entrepreneur, who publicly announced that he would cover the full cost of food for Sunday’s gathering in memory of his ancestors. This meant providing three meals to more than 15,000 people.” Acharya runs Brightwood Adult Day Care, which caters specifically to Bhutanese elderly, its website says.

Another Adhikari in Ohio, Nirmali Adhikari, owns Medina Home Healthcare, which was paid $22 million by Medicaid. Its billing topped out at nearly a million dollars in one month in December 2023. Its website is a dead link, and it hasn’t posted to its Facebook page since September 2024. Its last post says the person posting on behalf of the company lives in India.

Can’t go home again

The businesses appear to earn money from the astronomical portions of fellow Bhutanese in Ohio who are on Medicaid, the federal-state medical program for the poor, and then claim to need the government to pay a person of their choice to be their personal aide.

The government knows that the ethnic group doesn’t just have a monopoly on providing Medicaid services; they are often providing them exclusively to fellow members of their ethnic group. An official Ohio website lists seven adult day cares in Franklin County, and two have asterisks letting non-Nepalese elderly know that it is not for them.

The Nepalese-speaking Hindu minority in Bhutan was expelled by the Buddhist-majority country’s leaders in the 1990s, and lived in refugee camps in Nepal until being resettled, almost entirely to North America, beginning in 2008.

Only a couple thousand were sent to Ohio. Yet now, “up to 30,000 Bhutanese-Nepali individuals have settled here in the Greater Columbus area,” according to the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio (BCCO).

“Although in the beginning people were resettled in different states and cities, through internal migration (secondary and tertiary), Columbus now has the highest Bhutanese population anywhere outside Bhutan,” BCCO said.

Many of the home health businesses are based in Reynoldsburg, where BCCO’s former president now serves on the city council. (BCCO has received $1.2 million in federal grants, used for activities such as paying one Kamal Adhikhari to teach refugees to “grow culturally relevant greens.”)

The welfare dependency has put enormous strain on the government’s budget, but it has been good for one political party.

A local paper reported last November: “On Election Day in November 2015, Republicans swept all of the races in Reynoldsburg and Hilliard. Soon, Democrats will hold all elected offices in the two Columbus-area suburbs.”

Parker Thayer, an investigator for the Capital Research Center, contributed reporting.