By late summer, the bright fish tanks, soothing ocean videos, and mirrored infinity room inside Hoskinson Health & Wellness Clinic in Gillette will be little more than memories.
On Friday, clinic leaders confirmed what patients and staff had feared for weeks.
Charles Hoskinson’s grand vision for a Mayo Clinic in the West is no more. The clinic will be closing July 31.
Patients who want a copy of their medical records have been advised to request them before July 17, though the records will also be preserved, as required by law, for a minimum of 10 years.
“From the very beginning, this organization was built around a belief that the people of Wyoming deserved access to exceptional health care close to home,” according to a statement from the clinic sent to Cowboy State Daily.
“We set out to create something very ambitious: a place where patients in our rural community could access advanced care, specialty providers, prevention programs, and modern medical technology without having to leave the region,” the statement adds.
Highly skilled providers were recruited “from across the country and around the world,” the statement continued, as part of a vision for an improved healthcare model that would be born in Wyoming.
“Unfortunately, despite those efforts and investments, we have reached the difficult conclusion that the organization is no longer financially sustainable in its current form,” the statement continued. “The decision came with exhaustive deliberation.
“Our leadership is focused on executing an orderly, compassionate, and responsible transition for our patients, staff, and the community we so deeply appreciate.”
The statement thanked everyone who had been involved in and believed in the clinic’s mission.
“We understand this news will cause frustration, disappointment, and uncertainty for many people,” the statement said. “We deeply regret the impact this decision will have on the employees who dedicated themselves to this mission and the patients who trusted us with their care.”
Hoskinson’s Clinic Changed My Life
For patients like Shawnna Langdon, living with aggressive rheumatoid arthritis, the clinic’s closure means the loss of a lifeline.
The Gillette resident has good days and bad days. Sometimes, she’s so weak she can’t stand up from the couch by herself or turn the ignition key to her car. That makes getting to see specialists at the next nearest clinic in Rapid City, South Dakota, problematic, unless family members can take a day off.
Hoskinson’s, though, was a five-minute drive. That’s something she could manage on her own.
“Hoskinson’s Clinic changed my life 100% for the better,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “On days that I couldn’t move and my body was bad, I could wander in there, they would give me a shot, and within an hour I was feeling better again.”
The clinic’s network of specialists, all under one roof, had her thinking she could transfer all of her rheumatology care there this summer. Now she’s scrambling to find new doctors, and the surgery that had been planned for her feet at the end of May has been canceled.
“Having Hoskinsons here was such a relief,” she said. “To know they were just around the corner and they had everybody that I needed to help me. It really, truly made this journey I’m taking a lot easier. This is very heartbreaking, because I can’t handle the drive a lot of the time. This is very, very devastating for me.”
Langdon wasn’t the only patient expressing dismay at the closure.
Patients discussing the closure in social media forums expressed sadness, and talked about the life-saving care they or family members had received.
“Very saddened by this news,” Darylene Perkins Wadsack wrote on Hoskinson Health’s Facebook page. “We were all so appreciative to have an organization that was formed and set high goals and standards for health care in Gillette. It is very unfortunate that this wasn’t able to be sustainable.”
Judith Marriott Marler called it a “sad day.”
“Hoskinson brought so much to our community with an excellent mission of health care,” she wrote. “Many of us were pulling for success and welcomed new doctors in our lives. Sometimes it’s a matter of going too big, too fast, combined with not enough support. Good luck with recovering investment and from losses. A big thank you for trying.”
Sarah-Marie Palkki expressed anger about the closure.
“Thanks for not only one panic attack with losing three providers, but now another for losing them all,” she wrote. “I feel for our community, those who were like me and finally getting proper treatment for chronic illness.
“And for all those providers and staff who listened to your gracious promises and ideas and left jobs (and moved states) to now be abandoned.”
Doctors Caught Off Guard Too
The suddenness of Hoskinson Health’s closure didn’t just catch patients off guard, it also blindsided doctors and providers who had staked their careers on the clinic’s future.
One person, who spoke to Cowboy State Daily on condition of anonymity, said s/he was to join the organization in June and had just quit a current position after receiving an official offer from the clinic.
“They did my background check, and I had submitted all my onboarding requirements,” s/he said. “When I asked them why the offer was withdrawn, they told me it’s a business organization decision. The team decided not to open the position.”
That’s left the individual scrambling to find a new job and a new living situation, as well as juggling existing bills and other commitments.
“This has been extremely difficult for me, like right now, personally and professionally,” s/he said. “I had already made plans based on the offer and was preparing for relocation. It’s a very hard time for me now.”
Warning Signs
The clinic’s future has been in question for months after the facility announced 40 layoffs in January along with an acknowledgement that the clinic had grown too fast and was burning through cash at an “unsustainable rate.”
“Here is the stark reality,” clinic co-founder William Hoskinson wrote in a public Facebook post at the time. “My brother (Charles Hoskinson) has spent nearly $250 million on infrastructure, salaries, and investment in this community. He has received not a single penny of reimbursement for that investment.”
Charles Hoskinson is a mathematician and cryptocurrency tycoon. He was one of five co-founders of Ethereum but, after disputes with his cofounders, left Ethereum to create his own platform, Cardano — and made a fortune doing it.
The January layoffs had followed an even larger layoff in December 2025, when Hoskinson Contracting and Hoskinson Concrete, two companion companies created to build the clinic, laid off a combined 136 workers after finishing a 75,000-square foot building.
Plans for a surgery center that would be connected to the main building by an underground tunnel — just like one that the Mayo Clinic has — were put on hold following the January restructuring.
William Hoskinson publicly accepted blame for the problems that led to the layoffs.
“The blame for growing too fast falls on the Hoskinson family,” he wrote. “We moved too quickly because we wanted to say ‘yes’ to every request for help.”
Declining insurance reimbursement rates, high provider salaries, and an unfavorable payer mix — the proportion of patients on Medicaid, Medicare, or with no insurance — were identified as among core financial pressures the clinic faced.
William Hoskinson has told Cowboy State Daily in the past that the clinic was serving roughly 18,000 to 20,000 patients, and that it was taking no other government funding outside of Medicaid or Medicare reimbursements.
Despite the financial turbulence, the family had maintained publicly that closure was not an option.
“We are committed to staying here, to serving you, and to making health care in Gillette better,” William Hoskinson wrote at the time.
As recently as two weeks ago, patients told Cowboy State Daily they’d seen work crews moving through the facility, making improvements — a detail that made Friday’s announcement all the more jarring for a community that had little warning the end was near.
A Clinic Unlike Any Other In Wyoming
Hoskinson Clinic opened in stages starting in late 2022, followed by a grand opening in May 2023.
The clinic was no ordinary rural doctor’s clinic.
The Hoskinson family had envisioned it as the Mayo Clinic of the West. It’s 74,000 square feet of clinical space alone was more than some community hospitals and it was stocked with technology typically only found in major academic medical centers.
Patients in Gillette, a city of roughly 32,000, could walk in and get same-day MRI scans, high-definition nuclear imaging, 3D mammograms, vascular ultrasound, and 360-degree skin scanning. The clinic’s device for the skin scan was only the second such piece of equipment in the United States, with the Mayo Clinic having the first.
The clinic also offered DNA sequencing to help identify which medications might work best for individual patients, along with anti-aging and regenerative medicine programs, hyperbaric chambers for wound care and cognitive treatment, an in-house compounding pharmacy, an infusion suite for biologics, and a Lifestyle Center focused on nutrition and longevity science.
More than 40 providers worked under one roof with a long list of specialties ranging from nephrology and phlebotomy to neurology, cardiology, and allergies.
Part Museum, Part Clinic
The extravagance didn’t stop at the exam room door.
The clinic’s interior was a world unto itself, designed in part as a personal museum of Charles Hoskinson’s globe-trotting life.
Cowboy State Daily took a tour of the facility last year in October.
Elegance and symbolism began in the entryway with a Terrazzo marble-and-granite floor copying a familiar design at the Denver International Airport, where Charles frequently departed on journeys to more than 80 countries while building his crypto empire.
The waiting area was modeled after a Swedish hotel he favored, with buffalo cowhide panels behind the front desk.
Paintings by Charles’ favorite artists lined the halls, including works by Vladimir Kush, a Russian-American painter known as the founder of “metaphorical realism,” whose fantastical canvasses command tens of thousands of dollars each.
Artifacts like Roman coins were scattered throughout the facility. There was a nonfungible token flown in space, and a 14-foot replica of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which had been given to Charles as a personal birthday gift during a visit to the pyramids, which were closed just for him and lit up in his honor.
Floor-to-ceiling screens streamed 72 hours of scenic footage from around the world.
A living moss wall hung in one corridor and there was an “infinity” room — a chamber of mirrors designed to repeat a single image down to eternity — for what the family described to Cowboy State Daily as immersion art therapy.
Two wall-mounted saltwater aquariums were to be stocked with Caribbean and Hawaiian fish, requiring a dedicated pump room to maintain the proper ocean chemistry, while a vivarium was to house Amazon rainforest dart frogs — rendered harmless by feeding them fruit flies instead of the poisonous ants that make them toxic in the wild.
Two life-size talking robots — replicas from the television series “Lost in Space” and the film “The Forbidden Planet” — roamed the halls. Plans called for adding Godzilla and Mothra figures, too, and there were to be dinosaur fossils hanging from the ceiling of the new wing.
The building even included a “napatorium” for Charles — a private nap room inspired by Thomas Edison’s habit of dozing with a ball in each hand to catch creative ideas while in the hypnagogic state between sleep and waking.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.


