Abdul El-Sayed Doubles as Consultant for Health Nonprofit Led by ‘Scam Artist’ Accused of ‘Exploiting Medicare’
Washington Free Beacon
Alana Goodman
August 25, 2026
Left-wing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has attacked businesses that purchase doctors’ offices and implement changes aimed at “jacking up the revenue,” including by overbilling Medicare. Over the past year, however, he’s made close to six figures working as a consultant for a nonprofit health care company that former employees called a “scam” focused on buying medical practices and “exploiting Medicare” to increase revenue.
El-Sayed collected $82,000 in consulting fees from One Health Partners, a Chicago-area nonprofit owned by Illinois businessman Ali Karim, who has also donated $7,000—the maximum allowable amount—to El-Sayed’s campaign, federal disclosures show. The consulting work appears to have taken place while El-Sayed was running for Senate. His initial personal financial disclosure, covering January 2024 to June 2025, does not list income from One Health Partners. His more recent disclosure, which covers January 2025 to July 2026, does mention the company and indicates that El-Sayed started consulting for it no earlier than July 2025, three months after he launched his Senate campaign.
El-Sayed wrote in his disclosure that he provided One Health with services “supporting nonprofit healthcare strategy, operations and quality improvement for patients with limited healthcare access.” A Washington Free Beacon review of the company and its owner, Karim, paints the company in a different light.
According to One Health’s website, it purchases small medical practices and helps manage their operations, allowing doctors to “focus on practicing medicine while we handle the business side of healthcare.” The company, which obtained tax-exempt status in January, claims it has completed over $1 billion in debt-free “all-cash acquisitions.”
But court filings, state investigatory records, and interviews with former executives reveal that Karim has left a trail of angry doctors, investors, and former employees across the country.
Karim’s previous business ventures, including precursors to One Health, have drawn lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny in multiple states. Wisconsin securities regulators sanctioned him over allegations that he used investor money to pay personal expenses, while the Arizona attorney general opened an investigation into claims that he used fraudulent documents to try to take out a loan in another company’s name.
Doctors have also accused Karim in court of taking control of their practices and finances after promising them buyouts but failing to pay them out. And former employees told the Free Beacon that Karim’s business model was a “scam” centered on “exploiting Medicare” reimbursements.
Tom Temter, who served as the former vice president of operations last year for a Karim enterprise that was a precursor to One Health, said the company focused on buying up medical practices in order to build a “captive base [of patients] that had Medicare cards” in niche areas with lucrative Medicare reimbursement rates.
“They would find something that was a service or a product that had a high ratio of reimbursement to expense, and that’s their business model,” said Temter. “When the reimbursement [rates] changed, they just shut that whole part of the company down.”
“He was running a scam posed as a real company,” said Shadrach Miller, who helped run the Arizona operations for Karim’s previous company, Atlantis Global Health, and called Karim a “scam artist.” “He was just exploiting Medicare.”
El-Sayed’s work for a company that deploys such practices stands in stark contrast to his rhetoric on the health care industry, which he has routinely attacked for buying up doctors’ offices, consolidating them, and exploiting vulnerable patients with Medicare cards by billing the program for extraneous services.
In a 2022 Detroit Metro Times column, for example, El-Sayed criticized entities that “exaggerate patient diagnoses” to bill the Medicare program for more money. “Code high, treat low,” he wrote. “Everyone from traditional health insurers to private equity firms are lining up to cash in.”
One year later, in a 2023 episode of his podcast America Dissected, El-Sayed lamented the “corrosive role” of health care management companies that purchase doctors’ offices.
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