Lakewood Hospital Closing???

Lakewood City Council Members,

I'm not one to normally pick up the pen and write about such matters, but I cannot let this go without saying something. I've lived and worked in Lakewood for most of my life. I live in the home that I grew up in, which will be 100 years old this year. It's been in my family for 50 years and only the second surname to own it. I run the administrative side of a 102-year-old manufacturing company here in Lakewood and have worked there for 38 years. I love this town for its diversity of people, convenience, offerings of restaurants, churches, city services, school system, parks, libraries, and yes, our hospital.

I know I do not have all of the facts before me about Lakewood Hospital's proposed closing. However, what I do know is that a lot of what I've heard so far just does not add up.

Lakewood Hospital, when the clinic took over, was a thriving hospital, otherwise, why would the Clinic have wanted to enter into that agreement in the first place? You also can't tell me that hospitals are not still thriving or the Cleveland Clinic would not be building a brand new hospital in Avon. The reason for the Hospital's closing is being sold to us as "they are losing money" and "the future of medicine is changing, going towards more preventative health care." If Lakewood Hospital is now losing money, who was steering the ship when this was happening, that would be the Cleveland Clinic. If our business would start selling off our profitable lines, we too would no longer be able to exist as a business. So when the Clinic started dismantling the hospital over time, sending profitable departments elsewhere, Pediatrics, the Pain Center and Trauma Center, what would you expect to happen?

I can understand that medicine is changing and the way it is delivered. As a business we deal with this every day trying to do what is best for our employees and deliver an affordable health care plan. I am not convinced that with this change in medicine that the citizens of Lakewood will not have the need to be hospitalized any longer. Yet the citizens of Avon, who live just to our west, must not be practicing preventative medicine because a brand new 120 bed hospital is being built there by the same entity that's driven our hospital into supposed insolvency, the Clinic.

How can this be? I know a large part of the existing physical structure of the Hospital is old and I'm sure expensive to operate. Our business is 102 years old, we deal with the same mechanical and structural issues every day. So I can see where a possible change would be needed to improve infrastructure and technology, but if you're tearing down the existing building anyways, why not incorporate hospital beds and keep our 108-year-old hospital intact. If as many beds won't be needed in the future, build it with fewer beds. Why did a new hospital have to be built in a totally different community when one already existed here? Look at the density of population in Lakewood and the immediate surrounding area compared to Avon.

So now our city has on the table the possibility of entering into a new agreement with the same entity, the Clinic, with whom we already have an agreement to operate our city-owned hospital, for a given number of years, which would relinquish them of this responsibility of managing this facility for the remainder of those years. The new agreement would then make the Clinic the owners and operators of their own "preventative health care facility" on what would then be former city land. Would you really want to enter this kind of business deal with the same entity that ran our 108-year-old hospital into insolvency? Sounds like a pretty sweet deal for the Clinic.

Maybe I'm painting a bad picture of the Clinic, don't get me wrong, I think we as citizens are very lucky to have the world-renowned Clinic facility in Cleveland. They have many accomplishments in the fields of medicine. I, however, do not feel that they have done their due diligence pertaining to their commitment they had made to the citizens of Lakewood and surrounding areas to run and operate our hospital. It also appears that they have steered the ship in the direction they wanted it to go to best serve their interests apparently backing our city administrators into a corner with nowhere to go other then the direction the Clinic wants.

As our council people, I ask that you look long and hard at this agreement. Where is the lost tax revenue that the hospital generates going to come from? Where will our citizens, who I know will not all be saved from preventative medicine go when hospitalization is necessary? If Lakewood Hospital is gone, which has always been one of our strongest assets and made this city so attractive, how will this affect future families looking for a place to live? Have you reached out to the people of Lakewood who voted for school levy after school levy to support rebuilding our school buildings, because they know the value of these institutions in our city, to see how they truly feel about this? Is there no other way?

Thank you for your service to our city.

Sincerely,

Jeff Snyder

Read More on Letters To The Editor
Volume 11, Issue 7, Posted 7:10 AM, 04.01.2015