Eneida Roldan went into medicine to save lives. Now she's the hatchet girl killing jobs.

Or so some people would have us believe.

Roldan, CEO of Jackson Health System, came out with a wallop Friday after spending months begging unions to take pay cuts and pressing politicians to hand over more money for one of the nation's top teaching institutions, now barely on life support.

Her solution?

Close Jackson North and Jackson South and lay off more than 4,400 medical professionals and staff -- a $165 million clean slate.

Well, not quite.

Jackson's facing a $229 million deficit and rising. But there's money coming from Medicaid billings that were messed up by the hospital's lackadaisical billing system, which is now getting fixed.

County commissioners and state legislators don't have a penny to spare. Jackson already gets a half-cent from the sales tax, but that revenue has been falling. The deficit -- which Roldan, who's been CEO for less than a year, inherited -- is just too mammoth to close without a miracle.

10 DAYS TO SIGN OFF

So Friday was D-Day. Roldan told the Public Health Trust, which oversees Jackson, that it has 10 days to sign off on her plan.

From Tallahassee to Liberty City, everybody started to point fingers. Executives at other area hospitals gulped at the potential consequences: Where will the poor in the south and north ends of the county go if Jackson closes those public hospitals?

They'll go to the private ones out in the 'burbs that now claim to have little room for those pesky poor people.

Ouch!

Even at Jackson Memorial, the centerpiece of its teaching hospital partnership with the University of Miami's exceptional doctors, Roldan got tough, cutting back on the number of emergency room beds.

Where will the overflow poor go then? Maybe to UM's hospital, which it bought a couple years ago from Cedars -- the one that gets the insured patients.

Masterful, Doctora.

Anyone who grew up here has a soft spot for Jackson, and Roldan is wise to exploit it.

There's the businesswoman who last week sang Jackson's praises to me for saving her husband's life this month after a botched-up surgery at another hospital caused an infection.

$1,000 BABY BILL

My little brother was delivered at Jackson Memorial in 1961 -- the first in the family to be born in the USA. Ah, those were the days of fiscal sanity. My mom spent three or four days recovering and was billed a little more than $1,000.

That was big money then, but still, people paid their bills, no matter how poor -- and we were. My parents scrimped and saved week by week to pay their obligation.

Not today.

Too many people think a public hospital -- even one renowned for its trauma care and various specialties -- is not their problem.

Something's got to give.

Roldan already has cut her executive team by almost half, slashed their salaries and done away with perks. Her salary ranks in the lower 22 percentile of teaching hospital CEOs' pay. She earns about $170,000 less than her predecessor.

And still, the union won't budge. The SEIU Local 1991 labor union's president believes her members should be exempt from any pay cuts. Hey, lady, we're in a deep recession here. Would you rather have your folks fired?

As Trust Chairman John Copeland, an accountant, wisely notes, ``It is time for tough decisions.''

D-Day is here.