DeFede: Jackson CEO Playing Dangerous Game

MIAMI - (CBS4) - When Jackson President and CEO Eneida Roldan announced that she wanted to layoff nearly 4,500 employees and close two hospitals, she described her proposal as a "recovery plan" for the nation's third largest public hospital.

"I can not say this enough, tough decisions like this are the right choice if we are going to fulfill our mission and keep Jackson Health a sustainable and stable organization," Roldan told members of the Public Health Trust Friday. "Of course this plan is controversial. There will be push back. There will be alternative ideas and those who want more time. But we are running out of time."

But the fact of the matter is Roldan didn't make the tough decisions. Instead she is playing politics. What she presented was not a recovery plan, it was a threat. And a cruel one.

Roldan has decided to play what amounts to a game of chicken with the lives of Jackson's 12,000 employees. She is threatening a doomsday scenario which she hopes will spur the unions to offer wage concessions. At the same time, she is attempting to blackmail the county commission to either bail out the hospital with cash or allow it to break away from the county and form its own independent taxing district.

And while I understand that Roldan is in a difficult position, with few options, the path that she has chosen has left thousands of her employees – thousands of families – afraid and that they are about to lose their jobs.

Make no mistake; changes are coming to Jackson.

There will be layoffs, but there will not be 4,487 layoffs as Roldan proposed.

There will be programs that will be reduced or eliminated, but Jackson will not close its hospitals in the north and south end of the county. The County Commission, the County Manager, the County Mayor won't allow it to happen.

Could the hospitals be sold? Sure.

But Roldan's "plan" actually hurts the chances of selling the hospitals because it announces to the world that Jackson North and South are going out of business and there is a fire sale in the offing. Jackson has just lost whatever leverage it might have had in trying to unload the hospitals to interested groups.

There is so much about Roldan's "plan" that makes no sense. She announced that she will close the hospital's P.E.T Clinic on Miami Beach – which fights against the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The savings to the hospital as a result: $300,000.

This is a $1.9 billion enterprise and they are going to shut down their AIDS outreach program on Miami Beach in order to save $300,000?

On Sunday, CBS4 News learned that Roldan hired a crisis management team to come in for 60 days at a cost of almost $100,000. If you can come up with the money for an out-of-state PR firm you can come up with $300,000 for a valuable AIDS program.

Last week, Miami Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez and County Commissioner Natacha Seijas offered an ordinance which would have seized control of Jackson away from the Public Health Trust and instead given control to a transition board appointed by the Mayor. The proposal faced withering criticism from commissioners.

If Roldan continues to pursue this drastic, meat cleaver approach to fixing the hospital's problems, you can expect that proposal to be revived. After all, it was only tabled.

In interviews with a variety of officials at County Hall the one thing that emerges is a sense of shock that Roldan would have wasted so much time to offer a "plan" that has no chance of being approved.

As one senior county official said to me: "This is the plan we have been waiting for? This is the plan she took months to draft and present? This is the best that she could do?"

Even those who have been supportive of Roldan expressed shock at what she proposed.

County Commissioner Katy Sorenson said she specifically asked Roldan in a meeting three weeks ago if she planned on closing Jackson South and Roldan assured her she would keep the hospital open. She also said Roldan told her that she was anticipating approximately 1,100 layoffs.

"How do you go from 1,100 layoffs to 4,400 layoffs in a couple of weeks?" Sorenson asked. "Something clearly is not right. I don't know if she is playing a game, but what is happening at Jackson is far too serious for that."

Commissioner Sally Heyman echoed Sorenson's remarks.

"It's as knee jerk as it gets," said Heyman, who said she would not support closing either Jackson North or Jackson South.

Heyman said she was upset at the idea that Roldan knew she was going to propose these massive cuts on Friday, but failed to even mention them two days earlier when she testified before the County Commission.

Roldan told CBS4 News she made the decision to close Jackson North and South two weeks ago.

"If she had this in the works and wasn't forthright with us, I have a real problem with that," said Heyman. "I don't know what she is thinking."

During Friday's Public Health Trust meeting, County Manager George Burgess – who was given no advance warning of what Roldan was proposing – started to pick it apart in questions to Jackson's Chief Operating Officer David Small.

Since Friday's meeting Burgess and his team has gone through the document and according to sources familiar with their review, they have labeled Roldan's proposal "sloppy" and "disjointed."

The risk now for Roldan is that county leaders may just end up cutting her out of the process and essentially dictating a new recovery plan to her and her team.

The only good part to her plan is that she has gotten everyone's attention. If that was her goal then she succeeded. But she accomplished little else.