Mission Local is tracking Daniel Lurieโs appointments on a live page here, where you can see the comings and goings at the major city departments and the mayorโs office as they happen.
Mayor Daniel Lurie appointed Daniel Tsai, a longtime director for Medicaid in Massachusetts and former federal Medicaid chief, to lead the San Francisco Department of Public Health today.ย
โHe understands what it takes to make a public-health system work, not just in theory, but in practice,” Lurie said at the Maria X Martinez Health Resource Center in SoMa, which provides urgent care for people experiencing homelessness. “His experience is broad, but his commitment to patients and communities is clear throughout.โ
โIn our last meeting, I will say that he walked into City Hall, and I looked at him and I said, ‘Can we go walking?'” Lurie added. “We got up, and we walked through the Tenderloin, and seeing him and his compassion right there, I knew that he was the right person to lead this department.โ
Tsai, standing next to Lurie and joined by his wife and two young sons, said his priority would be “tackling together the opioid and homelessness crisis and making real, tangible progress around that in a compassionate way effectively.โ
While drug overdose deaths dropped last year to 633 from record highs, they are still many times more than pre-pandemic averages.
Tsai and Lurie were joined on Tuesday by five supervisors: Matt Dorsey, Jackie Fielder, Chyanne Chen, Connie Chan and Myrna Melgar.
Prior to this post, Tsai’s career focus has been in healthcare. Tsai was appointed in 2021 to lead the nation’s Medicaid program โย the country’s public health insurance program for low-income people โ at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Biden-Harris administration.ย
For about four years as the head of Medicaid, which the Trump administration is now looking to shrink, Tsai led the agency to strengthen care for mental health and substance use. He also focused on interventions for individuals experiencing homelessness with medical and behavioral health conditions.ย
Before that, Tsai served as Massachusettsโ Medicaid Director for more than six years, from 2015 to 2021, and was the state’s longest-serving Medicaid director in nearly two decades. Tsai was also previously, for eight years, a partner at McKinsey’s healthcare and public sector practices, where he worked in areas such as state Medicaid programs, healthcare providers and health plans.ย
Tsai has no medical training, and this will be his first post at San Francisco City Hall. He’s also not the first McKinsey hire of the Lurie administration: Kunal Modi, a partner at the consulting firmโs Bay Area offices, is serving as Lurieโs health and homelessness โpolicy chiefโ to oversee the public health department, among others. Modi and Tsai will, presumably, work closely together.
Tsai is succeeding Dr. Grant Colfax, who was appointed by former Mayor London Breed in January 2019 and announced his departure on Jan. 16, 2025.ย
More of a administrator
Articles like these are one of the reasons I really appreciate Mission Local <3
Not a fan of McKinsey consultants , mostly inexperienced college graduates with little or no expertise in any specialties of science, defense systems, delivery systems of you name it in medicine, humanities, arts or whatever but they write voluminous reports with recommendations to improve efficiencies of workers and bureaucrats on specialities they know nothing ofโฆusually to give management and bureaucrats something to wave at employees or overseers. Having said that I hope Mr. Tsai is up to safe guarding our Public Health system. I wish him all the best.
Want senior SME level work from a consultancy? You can, but you’ll get charged multiples accordingly.
I have to say, it seems very positive that the former state Medicaid director and then US Medicaid leader is coming to San Francisco to lead our Public Health organization. Think this is good news.
Of course. Billionaire mayor hires McKinsey partners to respond to homeless, mentally ill drug addict proliferation downtown. Maybe they can finance a facility for treatment and training out in the counties. Napa?
Career wise, quite the step down for Tsai. What with having to go work in the trenches. Looks like he sees the writing on the wall though, and is ducking out from the around-the-beltway play for a while. At least we’re not some dump of a place like (fill in random braindead anti-vax hole). And, considering the racist tunes coming out of White House courtship circles, there’s strength in numbers for Asian-Americans out here.
” quite the step down for Tsai.” – From promoting opioids to… not doing that?
Campers,
This guy’s previous employers (with him as boss) tried very hard to close Laguna Honda during the last decade plus.
They used a loophole installed by one of the Bush presidents which gave an audit department the power to close hospitals.
Am I the only one who recalls this ?
You hearing this, Westside Observer ?
Maybe I’m wrong.
Wouldn’t be first time on such a complex matter.
go Niners !!
h.
Well, let’s see if we see the kinds of bone-headed moves again that started Laguna Honda’s spiraling in the first place. (As we remember, that was when they moved hardline addicts in to see if they can safe a few dollars)
Congratulations
Hopefully he will be better at this then Colfax .
The dept of public health has been mia , not transparent , helpful or been able to reach to get info and request help for years .
Shameful dept .
We need their help and hope they will change .
Colfax with all the other county health directors pushed for the quarantine during Covid. London stole the thunder by making the announcement a day before they were supposed to. I wonder what this guy would do if we had a major catastrophe? Hey Daniel, what do I do?