Santa Clara County to buy Regional Medical Center

After months of fighting to save Regional Medical Center’s services, Santa Clara County leaders figured out how to stop the owner of the hospital from gutting them: they plan to buy it.

County officials today announced their intent to buy the hospital from HCA Healthcare , the nation’s largest hospital corporation, for $175 million. County Executive James Williams said the county approached HCA about the deal and both sides agreed the price was fair. The funding is coming from a one-time reimbursement of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Williams said the county can also issue lease revenue bonds using Regional itself as collateral. He added that the county can tap into public hospital related revenue streams to fund the ongoing expense of running the hospital.

The county and HCA are aiming to complete the transaction in the first quarter of 2025. Once the deal goes through, the county intents to restore prior service cuts including the trauma center and maternity.

“Making Regional Medical Center part of Santa Clara Valley Healthcare’s network of hospitals and clinics will ensure that East San Jose and the surrounding community continue to have access to top-notch Level II trauma, comprehensive stroke, specialized heart attack, and ultimately, labor and delivery care,”  Williams said in a statement.

Board of Supervisors President Susan Ellenberg said the county has to close the sale expeditiously to mitigate the impacts of Regional’s cuts which have already taken effect on Aug. 12.

“It will be an expansion of services in really meaningful ways,” Ellenberg told San José Spotlight.

This will be the county’s fourth hospital purchase since 2019, when it bought O’Connor and St. Louise Regional hospitals and De Paul Health Center in Morgan Hill that were on the verge of closing. This is the latest effort to save financially struggling hospitals from shuttering or cutting services and turning swaths of Silicon Valley into health deserts.

Darcie Green, executive director of Latinas Contra Cancer, has been at the forefront of patient advocates’ fight against Regional’s service cuts. She said that in the span of less than a year, East San Jose went from the prospect of becoming a health care desert to having more services and options than East Siders have had in years.

“There’s an opportunity to build out a true health and medical home in the East Side where everyone is welcomed,” Green said.

City Councilmember Peter Ortiz has been one of the most vocal critics about Regional service cuts. He frequently references about how his mother’s life was saved at the hospital.

“I am greatly relieved,” Councilmember Peter Ortiz told San José Spotlight. “I had grave concerns about the direction the hospital was headed under the ownership of HCA. I think that when it comes to health care, the decisions should be made for the benefit of the community, not shareholders. With the county at the helm, we’ll be able to maintain services and maybe restore services lost under HCA’s control like labor and delivery, pediatrics, OBGYN. Eastside families have gone without those services for too long.”

The turnaround comes after the Tennessee-based private health behemoth, HCA Healthcare, announced it would close its Level II adult trauma center and cut stroke and heart attack care at 225 N. Jackson Ave. The cuts took effect on Aug. 12, after activists and county officials called on state public health officials and Attorney General Rob Bonta to intervene with no success . Meanwhile, the company is expanding Good Samaritan Hospital which serves the wealthier west side.

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Critics for months painted a troubling picture of what the effects of the cuts would look like. County doctors had publicly deemed the idea “dystopian” at public hearings earlier this year, warning the closures could send a 70% surge in trauma patients , or about 2,600 cases per year, to the ill-equipped and under-resourced Valley Medical Center eight miles away.

Emergency services officials said the cuts would force East San Jose residents to endure longer waits for care and send life threatening ambulance delays cascading across the entire region, with more people needing transfers out of Regional for health issues after reducing or cutting services.

After months of protest from patient advocates and county leaders, HCA backtracked on the plans. In July, the company announced it would not close its trauma center entirely but downgrade it instead to a Level III trauma center, turning it into an on-call unit seen more often in rural areas. Yet the announcement did little to reassure critics.

HCA has a reputation for placing profits over patients. In San Jose, the multibillion-dollar corporation has been systematically closing services that rely on Medicare and Medi-Cal patients due to lower profit margins.

In 2004, HCA closed San Jose Medical Center, the city’s only downtown hospital. In 2020, the corporation shut down the maternity ward at Regional, which had an immediate effect on East San Jose residents. In 2023, HCA shuttered its acute care psychiatrist services and neonatal intensive care unit at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose.
Ellenberg said buying Regional was never part of the plan — but it quickly became necessary.

“We were not looking to expand the size of our hospital system. It’s already the second largest in the state. This wasn’t part of a long term strategic plan, but as Regional cut back one service after another, we could read the writing on the wall,” Ellenberg told San José Spotlight. “We saw what they did with San Jose Medical Center all those years ago, shutting down department after department until they eventually closed. We saw them investing more and more in Good Samaritan Hospital and neglecting a population that the county felt a responsibility for.”

Contact Brandon Pho at brandon@sanjosespotlight.com or @brandonphooo on X, formerly known as Twitter.

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