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.
“The way that they change your business practice is really all about jacking up the revenue,” he said. “They’re rewarding the billing for certain procedures in a way that maybe you weren’t rewarded in the past. So now you’re incentivized to do a lot more of those procedures.”
El-Sayed was specifically attacking health care management companies backed by private equity firms. One Health says it’s “different from private equity buyers” because, as a nonprofit, its “profits are invested into improving care delivery and expanding services” rather than distributed to shareholders. Nonprofit health care companies, however, can pay executives like Karim substantial salaries so long as they reflect a fair market value. They can also take advantage of programs that are not offered to for-profit entities. Nonprofits operating “specialized pharmacies,” for example, can purchase discounted drugs through the federal 340B Drug Pricing Program and then bill insurers, including Medicare, the full price for those drugs. One Health advertises operating “specialized pharmacies” and employs a vice president of pharmacy affairs whom the company advertises as having “two decades of experience in … 340B program leadership.”
“Abdul provided consulting services supporting nonprofit healthcare strategy, operations and quality improvement for patients with limited healthcare access as disclosed in his personal financial disclosure in accordance with Senate ethics rule,” El-Sayed campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon. “He stays committed to expanding access to health care for patients who need it, which is why he’ll beat Mike Rogers, who raked in campaign cash from Big Pharma and insurance companies and supported spiking healthcare costs for Michiganders.”
In addition to One Health, Karim owned a similar acquisition company called Atlantis Health Group. In 2013, he solicited a $20,000 investment from a Wisconsin man that was supposed to go to Atlantis. Instead, according to the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions, the funds went into the “personal checking account of Karim at Bank of America,” where he spent them on “personal expenses” and the expenses of “a separate preexisting company.”
Karim told the investor that Atlantis was bringing in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. In reality, the company had “never been profitable,” according to Wisconsin securities officials, who noted that Karim had just $654.41 in his personal checking account before he deposited the investor’s money. Despite this, Karim persuaded the investor to reinvest the funds six months later by telling him the initial $20,000 “was now worth $25,000 due to the accumulation of interest,” according to investigators.
In 2019, the Arizona attorney general opened an investigation into claims that Karim used false documents to attempt to take out a loan in the name of a company he had tried to purchase before the deal closed, according to records obtained through a state public records request.
Chris Flores, who was identified in the documents as the CFO of Atlantis, told Arizona investigators that Karim “consistently operates under the same protocol; he acquires an income stream from one entity, takes as much as he can from it then moves it to the next entity leaving the previous one to ‘burn.'”
Investigators also interviewed the owners of an Arizona company called Paradigm Laboratories, who told officials that Karim had offered to buy their company. Even though the deal never closed, Karim allegedly presented himself as the owner of Paradigm while attempting to secure loans.
While the Arizona investigation has not led to criminal charges, the claims are similar to allegations raised in civil court records. In 2017, a Florida home health care company called Stay-at-Home Home Health Care sued Karim, claiming he entered a deal to purchase the company but never paid up—even as he allegedly gained access to the company’s financial accounts. The lawsuit alleged that Karim transferred $100,000 from Stay-at-Home’s bank account to his own account without permission. The settlement in that case required Karim’s company to pay Stay-at-Home $75,000 plus attorney fees.
Two years later, a Florida diagnostic lab called Access Diagnostic Institute filed a similar lawsuit against Karim. The lab claimed he provided them with misleading financial information about Atlantis’s financial strength to persuade them to sell him their company for $2 million. According to the complaint, Karim didn’t come through with the money, but still used his position as a purported buyer to raid the lab’s money and credit for his own benefit. The case was dismissed because the plaintiffs were unable to locate Karim to serve him with the complaint, according to records.
Karim has also been the subject of a series of employee lawsuits. In 2021, two employees accused him of wrongfully terminating them after they complained about illegal business practices, including alleged payroll tax violations, anti-kickback law violations, and false marketing to patients. The case was later settled.
The same year, another former executive at one of Karim’s companies, Legend Health, sued him for allegedly failing to pay her owed wages and then firing her when she complained. The suit ended up going to arbitration.
David Towns, an Arizona man who worked for Atlantis, filed a lawsuit against Karim in 2015, alleging that the businessman induced him to lend $90,000 to his companies but never repaid him. That case was dismissed in 2017. Another former employee, Linda Struve-Doerflein, sued Atlantis in 2017, saying the company failed to pay her and used forged doctors’ signatures to lease medical equipment under the names of medical practices that had joined the Atlantis network. That case appears to have been resolved out of court.
“The company engages a range of outside consultants to support our health care strategy and operations, and Dr. El-Sayed was one of several professionals who provide that kind of support,” One Health told the Free Beacon. “We don’t have further comment on personnel matters.”
Karim did not respond to a request for comment.
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