Cardenas: A transformation in healthcare for the people of Starr County

Congressman, you’re always a hard act to follow.

I can’t begin to say how thankful we are for your advocacy for South Texas. You’ve always been there regardless of the issue. Healthcare is one. And I think that both of us have had a seat of watching transformations is happening all around us.

I have the privilege and the honor to serve as chairman of the board for Doctors Hospital Renaissance Health System.

Since our founding in 2003 we have grown quite a bit. In that time, we came from a small 23-bed facility and acute care of hospital and grown into the Rio Grande Valley’s leading health care system, now with over 500 beds, five hospitals, 6,000-plus employees, and 700-plus physicians on our medical staff. The most advanced and comprehensive health care service available in the Rio Grande Valley is here at DHR Health, with the subspecialties we have brought.

And from this seed, as the Congressman alluded to earlier, and those seeds have been planted in different communities and today we plant a very strong seed. You never know how things will start and where they will end up. And I’ll digress only for a second because it won’t be foreign to any of you here. But there was a young physician who came home to his community, here. I get emotional. His name was Mario Ramirez. He was a county judge as I recall, that was before my time, before I had grey hair. But he had a vision and he helped to found what is today the Starr County Memorial Hospital. Now tell me that wasn’t transformational. Was that transformational to this community? Absolutely.

We are there doing this, again. It is transformational what we’re doing today. It was transformational when we founded DHR Health because the idea was to change the course of healthcare in the Rio Grande Valley. There is not a family in this room that doesn’t remember what it means to have to leave your community in order to get health care.

Let me talk about myself for just a second. I don’t have to go very far, and I will bet you my story resonates with most of you here. My great grandfather died of Bright’s disease in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas. My grandfather was diagnosed here. My grandmother was diagnosed at MD Anderson with lymphoma and came to die at home. My grandfather had gastric cancer and died at home. My younger brother, who passed away in 2011, had spinal muscular atrophy. And he was diagnosed at a hospital in Galveston, Texas, UTMB. And when he needed speech therapy, he had to go to Our Lady of the Lake in San Antonio, Texas. Does this sound familiar to everybody here?

We don’t have to leave the Rio Grande Valley anymore. We don’t have to go anywhere to get the health care that this community deserves. We’re able to provide it ourselves. But in order to sustain it into the future we have to grow our own. That means educating the physicians of the future and who better than the ones that grew up right here? To have a place where they’re able to come back and serve their community, help care for abuelitos and abuelitas, the tios and tias, and everybody else who will come to their door.

So, we decided to build a health system that would never turn anyone away, no matter their ability to pay and give them what they have in every other major metropolitan area of our size.

The partnership that we share today and into the future with Starr County Memorial Hospital is the growth of a dream that was planted many years ago by Mario Ramirez. And I am standing here as a physician because of his interest in me when he wrote a letter of recommendation to help me make it to medical school.

So, I feel like I’m giving some payback, which I think is what’s really wonderful about what we do here, and we do it every day.

I want to thank Starr County for providing us the opportunity to serve you and I want to thank HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration) for their commitment to rural health and to Congressman Cuellar again, and Senator John Cornyn, and Representative Ryan Guillen, and all the other elected officials who made today possible.

I want to thank Senator Judith Zaffirini for being there with us this whole time as we made these things happened. I could not tell you enough about the support and partnership that we have with local physicians in this community which has made it possible for us to be able to put a residency program here and teach the next generation of physicians.

Without your help it would not be possible to teach the next generation of physicians and for that I thank you in advance. These are the physicians that will be doing the hard work and that’s the training. And that training bears fruit. We have seated in our audience a member from own residency program, one of the first residents, Dr. Carlos Farias, who graduated from our internal medicine program and he’s right here working for you here in Starr County.

I want to thank all of you for coming out to celebrate this momentous day because it is truly a momentous day. Today is the day that we begin the journey, and we watch the disparities in health care that exists between rural and other communities begin to disappear as we show them how it’s done.

Thank you.

Editor’s Note: The above commentary was provided by DHR Health Chairman of the Board Dr. Carlos Cardenas at a press conference held at Starr County Memorial Hospital in Rio Grande City on July 2, 2024. The conference was called by U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar to announce a $749,356 federal grant that will go to DHT to develop a Rural Residency Training Program in Starr County. 

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