Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those wo are kind to the needy honor him. –Proverbs 14:31 (NRSV)

When a city loses its hospital, doctors, crisis center, and medical offices because of unchecked corporate greed, the need to heal our society becomes more clear. This morning I attended a preliminary court hearing for a group known as “The Crozer 8.” They had been arrested at a peaceful sit-in protesting the closing of Crozer-Chester Hospital and its medical offices, facilities that had been providing essential services to over half a million people. About 2,700 employees abruptly lost their jobs when the healthcare system closed in May 2025, including my primary care doctor, gynecologist, and another physician who had been treating me for an ongoing medical condition.

Who are the Crozer 8? On Monday, September 8, 2025, fifty people, including former workers and patients, held a rally in front of the closed Crozer-Chester Medical Center campus in Upland, PA. Eight of the protesters entered a medical office building within the complex that had not yet been completely shut down. They peacefully sat on one side of the lobby, taking care not to block foot traffic.

They declared:

“We are a group of people whose families have been hurt and harmed by this criminal healthcare system that puts profit over our lives. We’re sick and tired of getting sick while Wall Street gets rich, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

In making the difficult decision to engage in nonviolent direct action and to risk arrest, they drew on the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who attended the nearby Crozer Seminary from 1948 to 1951. King had explained that breaking minor laws may sometimes be necessary to redress greater harm:

“There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed. There is a fire raging now… Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.” (The Trumpet of Conscience)

When ordered to leave by the police, the eight people who were participating in the peaceful sit-in refused to get up. They were arrested for “defiant trespassing.”

The protesters were members of at least two groups. One, Put People First! PA, a politically independent organization, had organized a “National Day of Action,” holding protests at four different sites across Pennsylvania where local residents have lost access to medical care because of corporate greed. The event held in our area, “Speak Out @ Crozer,” called on Delaware County to use eminent domain to reopen Crozer and to protest hospital closures caused by the corporate misuse of healthcare assets. Another group participating in the protest, the Nonviolent Medicaid Army (NVMA), is a national advocacy organization that organizes days of action focused on Medicaid, health access, and hospital closures. Both groups insist that healthcare is a fundamental human right.

Invited by a member of our Quaker Meeting, my husband and I attended the hearing today to show community support.We and our neighbors inChester have been left without a hospital in our city. Twenty-six hospitals have closed in Pennsylvania in the past five years. Over the past decade, more than 100 rural hospitals have shut down nationwide, and hundreds more are at risk. Like the Crozer 8, we, too, want new laws that will prevent corporations from siphoning healthcare assets for shareholder profit.

The Crozer 8 arrived this morning in red t-shirts, some half-hidden by jackets in the brisk autumn air. They offered donuts, coffee, and surplus t-shirts to supporters. Under trees near the courthouse, they conferred briefly with the lawyer representing all eight of them, then invited everyone to gather in a circle. Then each of the eight read a portion of a collective statement explaining their action and their hopes for just laws and healthcare for all. At the end, a minister among the Crozer 8 gave a short sermon, telling the story of the poor widow who pestered the unjust judge until he granted her justice (Luke 18:1–8). “We must do the same,” he urged. “We must take care of the needs of all.”

The minister taught a song, which we all sang together. As I joined my voice with theirs under the rustling trees, I felt the moral clarity of their action, the insistence that caring for one another is a basic act of justice.

One citizen, a young man who had stopped by on his way to work, told us that his life had been saved at Crozer-Chester when he was brought in with raging pneumonia. Another woman said her husband’s life had been saved there too, after a venomous spider bite that can be fatal. These two men might not have survived a longer ambulance ride.

The small courtroom was packed. Three police officers, two burly men and one woman dressed all in black, with firearms and other weapons strapped tightly to their bodies, stood beside the judge’s bench, talking casually while court staff prepared the room. Then, one by one, the eight defendants stood with their lawyer to address the judge. The judge handed them paperwork and instructed them to return to court in December.

In 2016, Prospect Medical Holdings, a private company, acquired the local Crozer-Keystone Health System in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which included four hospitals. In the following years, Prospect systematically stripped the assets of those hospitals for the profit of its shareholders and officers. The company sold the hospital properties to a real estate investment trust and distributed $457 million of the proceeds as dividends to investors, while burdening the healthcare system with a massive mortgage debt of more than a billion dollars. Prospect also failed to pay $150 million in pensions owed to hospital employees. Weighed down by debt, the hospitals could not stay afloat. Prospect closed two of them. Then in May 2025, the company declared bankruptcy, causing the sudden closure of the remaining two hospitals. In addition to abandonning communities not bereft of essential care, the company left behind huge unpaid debts. (According to the Chester Water Authority, Crozer-Chester Hospital, under Prospect’s management, left $1.7 million in unpaid water bills, a loss which now will be passed on to local residents through higher water rates.)

Since the closing of Crozer-Chester Hospital, the nearest remaining hospitals in our area, especially their emergency rooms, have been terribly crowded, sometimes with waits of nine hours before people in medical crisis can be seen. This summer, I attended a meeting of concerned neighbors. Among the speakers was a doctor who had worked in Crozer-Chester’s ER. He told us that since the closure, some patients who could have received life-saving care at Crozer died while taking a longer ambulance ride to another hospital.

After I suddenly lost access to all three of my local doctors, I became more aware that this kind of corporate looting of healthcare assets is taking place all over the country, a moral crisis affecting rural and low-income communities across the United States, irrespective of local politics. The for-profit corporation that owned Crozer-Keystone extracted millions of dollars from the four-hospital system, diverting funds meant for patient care into private profit. This was a choice made in boardrooms far from the people now suffering the consequences. This injustice reveals how easily human need can be overshadowed by greed.

The Biblical prophets warned that a society can only flourish if it takes care of those in need: the oppressed, the orphan, the widow, and the poor. A society that loses its moral compass will crumble. When explaining the destruction of the city of Sodom, Ezekiel said, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom; she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Ezekiel 16:49 (NRSV)

Healthcare is not a luxury, not a commodity like shoes, smartphones, or new kitchen cabinets. It is part of the web of care that sustains life and holds communities together. When that care is stolen to profit a few, it tears at the moral fabric of society. When human lives are endangered so that shareholders may receive another dividend, when hospitals are left standing empty and sold off, sometimes to be rebuilt as luxury housing, we are witnessing the unraveling of our social fabric. The loss of Crozer is not just a local tragedy; it is a symptom of a national illness, showing what happens when the hunger for profit is allowed to eclipse compassion.

Like the persistent widow, the Crozer 8 continue to demand that compassion and justice be restored to the heart of our public life.

The Crozer 8 are raising funds to help pay their fines and other court costs. Their fiscal sponsor is United Workers, Inc. If you are moved to read more about their witness and maybe to donate some funds, go HERE.

When the Healers are Sent Away, the Prophets Must Rise: When have you taken a stand for justice, peace, compassion, sustainability, or what is right and true?

© 2025 Marcelle Martin

Books by Marcelle Martin

A Guide to Faithfulness Groups explains what faithfulness is and how it can be cultivated by small groups that practice ways to listen inwardly together for divine guidance, a practice that holds great potential for supporting individuals of any faith in allowing the work of the Spirit to become manifest through them and their communities.

Our Life is Love: The Quaker Spiritual Journey describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who were inwardly guided by God to work and witness for radical changes in their society. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life, designed to be a resource for both individuals and groups to explore their spiritual experiences. It describes the journey of faithfulness that leads people to actively engage in God’s work of making this world a better place for all. Our Life is Love has been reviewed by Marty Grundy in Friends Journal, by Carole Spencer in Quaker Religious Thought, and by Stuart Masters on A Quaker Stew.

Both books are available from Barclay Press in hardback and paperback.