HEALTHCARE WE DESRVE
HEALTHCARE WE DESRVE
By Darcie Green
On April 1, 2025, something remarkable happened: Regional Medical Center transitioned from corporate control to public ownership under Santa Clara County. This wasn’t the first time the County took decisive action to protect healthcare access. However, it was a powerful moment because the action was backed by a months-long, community-led campaign that refused to let anyone look away. East San José made it clear: we would not allow harm, indifference, or corporate abandonment to go unchallenged.
For the community, the purchase represented a transformation in what was attainable, symbolizing the bravery and determination of County leadership, hospital administration, and healthcare workers who dedicated themselves to making the transition from HCA to public ownership a reality. However, it wasn’t the finish line; it was merely a door opening, and what follows depends on what we build together.
What We Fought For
Last year, HCA Healthcare—the largest for-profit hospital corporation in the country—announced plans to cut Regional’s trauma, cardiac, and stroke care services. This followed years of cost-cutting, which had already included closing the maternity ward.
HCA moved quietly, announcing its plans with minimal outreach or explanation. However, the County recognized the harm and raised the alarm, mobilizing patients, healthcare workers, community-based organizations, policymakers, and neighborhood leaders to take action. Through the Rescue Our Medical Care campaign, we knocked on doors, rallied outside the hospital, packed public meetings, and built a movement rooted in urgency and love for East San José. We organized protests, press conferences, town halls, teach-ins, and healing circles. We constantly reminded one another of the lives that would be lost.
Our campaign was grounded in defiance and protest, but if you were there, you would have also witnessed the laughter and the culture. You would have seen new relationships forming, new leaders emerging, and deep solidarity taking root. This combination of resistance and hope is uniquely and beautifully woven into East San José’s history—a legacy of struggle and triumph, of fighting for more while cultivating joy and power along the way.
Why It Mattered
The 2025 Santa Clara County Latino Health Assessment confirmed what many of us have experienced: East San José bears a disproportionate burden of chronic illness, housing insecurity, language barriers in care, and avoidable ER visits. For years, under HCA’s for-profit model, these inequities were deepened. Services were reduced. Staffing was strained. Culture and language were afterthoughts. When they chose to reduce more services, the community wasn’t even consulted. That model wasn’t just broken—it was extractive.
The County’s decision to purchase Regional was a necessary intervention in response to harm, and the community campaign represented a refusal to let private profit dictate public health. Together, these events revealed the failure of any existing level of government or law to hold this corporation accountable to the community or to patients.
At a time when our right to healthcare is still under attack, especially for immigrant patients and those who depend on Medi-Cal to survive, this example of public leadership and organized grassroots power advancing in the same direction provides a blueprint for defending access to care for every patient in our county.
The Road Ahead
Public ownership opens the door, but it doesn’t guarantee justice. Health justice must be built deliberately, collectively, and with patients at the center. Now we have the opportunity to ask and answer deeper questions: What does it mean to have truly local care? What becomes possible when patients are empowered and organized? What would be different if our relationship with our healthcare system resembled our relationship with our public schools, libraries, or parks? How do we create a system where our lived experiences genuinely shape the care we receive?
East San José should serve as the county’s beacon of health. And that corner of our city, where the Regional Medical Center, East Valley Clinic, and the seeds of a potential wellness center already exist, has the potential to become something new: a community-rooted health district. A place where care isn’t just delivered, but co-created. Where patients are empowered and act as system-level decision makers. Where healthcare is local, responsive, and built to last.
A Call to Action
The future of Regional and health in East San José will be shaped by the people who continue to show up. So, we must keep showing up with our ideas, our questions, our vision, and our demand that healthcare should not be only about avoiding or treating illness but about fostering wellness. A world with more time to read with your grandkids. To rest without fear. To walk the block without pain. A world where health brings justice, joy, and possibility into our lives.
April 1 was the beginning. What comes next will require all of us.
Join us: https://tinyurl.com/Defend-Our-Care