By Kyle Martin
Bay Area News Group
(TNS)
HAYWARD, CA — To potentially save lives and other hospitals from financial disasters set in motion by millions in federal funding cuts to healthcare, St. Rose Hospital workers staged a “die-in” at the facility and urged voters to pass the billionaire tax measure on the November ballot.
The protesters and hospital workers with SEIU United Healthcare Workers laid down on a lawn in the sun Thursday afternoon in front of paper tombstone props emblazoned with messages of doom and death. They symbolically represented what they expect to happen to Bay Area hospital patients under the Trump administration’s budget cuts under H.R. 1, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
This year, the President’s spending package chopped about $100 billion out of the state’s healthcare system, leaving a $100 million funding gap in the Alameda Health System.
“There’s a price to be paid when you have billionaires running our country,” Assemblymember Liz Ortega said Thursday. “It is our children who will not have access to care. It is our mothers who are dying—dying—giving birth.”
Fearing widespread and potentially life-threatening healthcare funding shortages and potential hospital closures, Ortega urged those gathered to direct their votes in favor of Proposition 40. She directed their frustrations toward wealthy billionaires, she argued should help pay to close the critical funding gaps left by the Trump administration.
“Yes on 40 because we matter, our lives matter,” Ortega said. “In the largest economy, the biggest economy in the world, [and California being] the fourth largest, no one should be denied care. No one should die because they could not access a doctor.”
Ortega galvanized the group from a stage in front of the hospital that she helped save from a devastating closure in 2024. She and Rep. Aisha Wahab, D-California, a former state Senator, led a push two years ago to get the Alameda Health System to acquire the hospital, which helped save Hayward’s only emergency room.
Stanford University in April agreed to partner with Alameda Health System to expand care at the hospital, which was expected to help the facility develop a new inpatient psychiatric unit and bolster its long-term stability.
Though she celebrated the successes, she also noted that it was followed shortly after by a crushing closure of the hospital’s maternity department in 2025.
A sign behind her read “Stop Killing Us / Save Healthcare.”
“This is about greed,” Ortega said, ridiculing the 200-plus billionaires who lived across the state. “Who needs billions of dollars?”
The Assemblymember also condemned Props. 41 and 42, two billionaire-backed counter-proposals that could halt Prop. 40 from passing into law.
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“No parent should have to make a choice about whether to put food on the table or take their sick child to the doctor,” Ortega added.
But Nastasha Evans, an Alameda Hospital patient access registration lead, said families and residents in the county are already forced to make those tough choices because of the cuts. Due to staffing shortages and strained workers, Evans said she’d been working for 14 days straight by Thursday.
“I’m exhausted, we’re tired. We’re all overworked,” Evans said. “Every department is burnt out.”
Evans told Bay Area News Group her hospital saw maybe a couple dozen or less patients per week without health insurance coverage before the cuts went into effect this year. Now that the cuts have started stripping Medi-Cal coverage from Californians, Evans said her facility sees upwards of 18 uninsured patients daily.
If the state fails to pass the wealth tax, she said she fears “this will make our situation drastically worse.”
Similarly, Justin Kmetz, a radiology technologist and a St. Rose employee of 24 years, fears that the hospital his kids were born in and his place of business will shutter its doors.
“I love working here,” Kmetz told Bay Area News Group. “Healthcare cuts are going to put a lot of hospitals in jeopardy that have lost funding.”
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