Garnet Health

Garnet Health

The Orange Regional Medical Center Employees' Retirement Plan was established in 1975 as a non-contributory defined-benefit pension for eligible employees of what is now Garnet Health Medical Center. Jonathan Schiller, who serves as President and CEO of the broader Garnet Health system, oversees the entity alongside Board Chair Virginia Rizzo. The plan remains headquartered in Middletown, New York, serving a workforce spread across three hospital campuses — the main campus in Middletown, the Harris campus in the Catskills, and the Callicoon campus along the Delaware River. The pension fund deploys capital across a buyout and co-investment multi-manager strategy, participating in private market allocations that belie its sub-$100 million estimated asset base. The approach reflects a common posture among smaller, self-administered hospital pensions: externalizing manager selection and due diligence while maintaining diversified exposure across private equity strategies. Beyond the pension plan, Garnet Health operates a separate 403(b) Retirement Savings Plan for its broader employee base, giving the system two distinct retirement platforms. The health system runs clinical and academic partnerships with Montefiore Health System, which in October 2025 signed a Letter of Intent for a future affiliation or merger, as well as Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine for residency programs and NewYork-Presbyterian for cardiothoracic surgery. The emergency services function is supported by SCP Health. The pension fund's investment operations are lean, consistent with a single-hospital-system retirement plan. No dedicated investment staff is publicly identified beyond the named system-level leadership. The Garnet Health Foundation — with separate boards for the main campus and the Catskills division, the latter chaired by Jason T. Giordano — handles philanthropic capital entirely apart from the pension vehicle. Community-facing affiliations include memberships with the Healthcare Association of New York State, where Schiller sits on the Board of Officers, and local chambers of commerce in Sullivan County. The pension plan remains a quiet, necessary institutional investor: small by national standards, unremarkable in structure, but sustained over five decades as the health system itself has evolved from a single community hospital into a regional provider. The plan's structural distinction is its durability inside a nonprofit health system that has expanded through campus additions and a pending affiliation with a major New York academic medical center. Unlike standalone corporate pensions that face sponsor risk, this plan is embedded in a going-concern healthcare provider with physical real estate and an ongoing clinical mission. The Montefiore affiliation, if completed, could reshape governance and potentially investment oversight, but the pension liabilities are ring-fenced, and the fund's conservative multi-manager posture positions it to absorb change without altering its fundamental approach.