Considering Zoom+Care clinics don’t accept Tricare, Medicaid or Medicare — they’ve been accused of focusing on focusing care on young and healthy patients — it makes sense the company would open a second Capitol Hill location. But this new location will also draw patients from a wider range thanks to proximity to Capitol Hill Station.
The company, which provides urgent, primary and specialist care, has submitted a plan to the city of Seattle to take over empty space in the new construction of the Hollywood Lofts building at 127 Broadway E, turning it into a clinic with four universal care rooms, a support room, and a pharmacy lab. Zoom officials told CHS they would be in touch last week but haven’t provided additional information on a second planned clinic on Broadway.
Zoom’s out-of-pocket costs for various treatments and services range from $25 to $299. Its services include well exams for men, women and children, injury visits, mental health evaluations, dermatology evaluation, ultrasounds and CT scans, among others.
According to its website, Zoom accepts most major insurance networks, and it launched its own insurance plan in 2014, but it doesn’t accept government-funded insurances.
This doesn’t sit well with some and has lead to protesting outside of some clinics.
“Zoom+Care’s profit-driven practice of cherry-picking the young and healthy while leaving the cost of the older and less healthy population to the remainder of the nonprofit community clinics and nonprofit providers will undermine an already stressed healthcare system,” Robby Stern, president of Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action said in an October press release. “Zoom’s refusal to accept Tricare, Medicare and Medicaid is simply unacceptable.”
According to Zoom’s website, the company can’t accept or provide service to Medicare patients even if they pay for services out-of-pocket due to federal law. The clinics can treat Medicaid and Tricare patients who pay for services themselves.
The company’s original Capitol Hill location is in the Joule building at 531 Broadway E and opened in the fall of 2011. It has six other locations around the city and clinics in Portland, Vancouver, and Salem. In 2011, CHS quipped that “something besides a restaurant” was opening along Broadway but the years since have seen minute clinics, dental facilities, and even pet care join the commercial artery.
The planned second Broadway location will neighbor Dick’s Drive-in, of all things, and will be the second business to sign on with Hollywood Lofts following candy chain Rocket and Fizz which opened this fall in the mixed-use building which incorporates a portion of the facade of the old Del Teet furniture store.The name Hollywood Lofts, by the way, honors the old Hollywood Video chain which cleared out of the space under cover of darkness way back in 2009.
Across the street from the planned clinic, plans are also in motion for four seven-story buildings as part of the development around Capitol Hill Station. The projects will face their first design review later this month. Tuesday night, the project’s developers from Gerding Edlen will host a community open house to talk about the review. We’ll assume the developer’s young staffers are probably familiar with Zoom+Care — Gerding Edlen is also headquartered in Portland.
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/event/capitol-hill-station-development-open-house/?instance_id=7433058
While ridership has boomed with the opening of Capitol Hill Station, the economic impact on the immediate neighborhood is less certain. As the new station opened, business owners said they were worried about rising rents and displacement just as Broadway survives and recovers from years of major construction.
Their website says Immediate Clinic, just down the street on Broadway between Pike & Pine, accepts Medicare and TriCare. So even if you have private insurance but if you want to support a clinic that doesn’t “cherry pick”, you’ve got a choice a couple of blocks away.
Isn’t Capitol Hill also within a stone’s throw distance of GroupHealth’s 15th St facility, not saying anything of the First Hill healthcare cluster that exists a few more blocks away.
While outpatient/urgent care facilities are the new norm, they’re only a tactic in a larger strategy to get people to see their doctors more frequently for check ups and minor issues, rather than waiting until you’re really really sick or injured and going to the hospital. Zoom+ isn’t the only UC facility on the block (as noted above), but their angle is trying to be more appealing to younger individuals who are one of the key lynch pins in driving down healthcare costs for everyone (more healthy people sign up, the more companies can bundle healthy individuals with people needing more urgent frequent treatments)
Federal laws also laws are broken all the time, immigration and pot being two. Pretty stupid someone over 65 willing to pay cash can’t walk in on a Sunday if he/she isn’t feeling well.
In my opinion, it is unethical for any doctor/clinic to not accept government-sponsored insurance. A physician/PA/NP should be willing to see any patient that wants to see them, as long as they have some form of payment….those without insurance or who can’t pay anything are excepted (that’s what community clinics are for). All providers must share the “burden” of taking care of those whose insurance might reimburse less than private insurance. Anything less is discrimination, pure and simple.
Shame on you, Zoom+Care.
Don’t know what you do for a living Bob or what services you sell. But unless you are willing to provide them for half price to seniors and 25% price to those on Medicaid, who are not allowed to copay the cost of the pack of cigarettes in their pocket, please don’t tell us that a clinic must accept whatever payment some third party mandates. They have a set of charges they are willing to accept. Where is the crime? This is not emergency care and other options exist in our city.
I’m a retired physician. Of course what they are doing is not “criminal,” but I stand by my statement that it is unethical.
I went to ZoomCare when I fell off my bike and injured my shoulder.
They took an x-ray – “it doesn’t look like you broke your shoulder”.
Went to a real doctor – “you broke your shoulder”