Owner of Boise-area urgent care clinics pays $3M to settle overbilling claims

A company that operated urgent care clinics in Idaho during the COVID-19 pandemic has paid $3 million to settle allegations of overbilling.

Bloom Care LLC allegedly submitted false claims to federal health insurers for medically unnecessary testing and inflated the extent of services it performed in violation of the False Claims Act, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney's office for Idaho.

Bloom operated franchise American Family Care Urgent Care clinics in the Treasure Valley, including at least one each in Boise, Meridian, Nampa and Garden City. By December 2023, the AFC clinics had been taken over by Sterling Urgent Care, an Idaho Falls company, and converted to Sterling clinics.

Half of the $3 million settlement is restitution, according to a copy of the agreement the U.S. attorney's office shared with the Idaho Statesman. The document, signed June 27, says Bloom also owned AFC Urgent Care franchises in New Mexico and Colorado.

Federal investigators said Bloom knowingly used the pandemic as an excuse to bill for streptococcus and influenza tests for asymptomatic patients.

They alleged that the clinics submitted claims for high-level evaluation and management services for COVID-19 patients that should have been billed at a lower level of service, which would have been reimbursed at a lower rate. To justify the high reimbursement claims, Bloom exaggerated the time it spent with such patients and the complexity of the evaluations needed to care for them.

The programs Bloom submitted claims to include Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Health Administration and another federal program that reimbursed health care providers for providing COVID-19 testing, treatment and vaccines.

A spokesperson for the agency declined to questions about where the clinics in Idaho were located or how and when the allegations came about. The Statesman determined that they were located at:

10965 W. Overland Road, Boise

3185 E. Ustick Road, Meridian

1610 Caldwell Blvd., Nampa

6965 N. Glenwood St., Garden City

Bloom is a foreign limited liability company formed in Utah. It was first registered with the Idaho Secretary of State's Office in March 2023 by owners Spencer Smith and Michael Weir, who signed the settlement agreement with the government. Bloom's registration status was changed to "inactive-withdrawn" in March. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. attorney's office said anyone with information about COVID-19-related fraud can report it by calling the Justice Department's National Center for Disaster Fraud hotline at 866-720-5721 or by submitting a complaint online.

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