Mike Nguyen | 2026 MHE Emerging Leaders in Healthcare

I grew up in Sacramento, California, in a working-class Vietnamese American family. My parents immigrated to the U.S. with little but with an enormous belief in what this country could offer if you were willing to work hard and show up for others. Those values — hard work, service and community — are the foundation of everything I do.

One of my earliest and most formative influences came from my own family. For a period of time growing up, we relied on Medicaid to help bridge a gap in healthcare coverage. That experience wasn’t abstract to me. It was real. It gave me a firsthand understanding of what the safety net means to families who are doing their best under difficult circumstances, and it planted a seed that would eventually grow into a career.

I earned a Bachelor of Arts in government from California State University, Sacramento, where I developed a deep interest in policy and public institutions.

My career has taken me from the California State Legislature, where I served as a legislative aide to state Sen. Ricardo Lara and staffed the Senate Committee on Health, to senior policy and advocacy roles at Health Plan of San Joaquin and Molina Healthcare. I also served as a CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] foundation health equity project manager, placed at the Hawaii State Department of Health, working to address COVID-19-related disparities. Prior to joining AlohaCare, I gained invaluable insight into provider operations working at Waikiki Health, a local federally qualified health center, as well as a local community provider. At AlohaCare, I serve as senior director of external affairs. As a safety net advocate, I have the privilege of advancing policy priorities for the more than 385,000 Medicaid enrollees across the state, which is nearly a third of the state’s population.

Turning point in your career

The turning point was personal before it was professional. Learning — really reckoning with — the fact that my own family had relied on Medicaid and many other public programs as a bridge to opportunity, an enabler to achieve one’s fullest potential, changed how I understood my work. For years, I approached healthcare policy as someone who found it intellectually compelling and morally important. However, those memories clarified something. I wasn’t just drawn to this work. I was connected to it.

The second turning point was more deliberate. When I joined the Health Plan of San Joaquin, I found myself working at the intersection of healthcare and community trust in a way I never had before. I was working directly with communities facing significant barriers such as housing instability, economic opportunity, food security, etc., that understandably took priority over addressing health disparities and seeing, up close, how policy decisions affected real people’s lives. That experience deepened my commitment to not just working in healthcare policy but responding holistically to the multifaceted policies affecting low-income communities.

Biggest day-to-day challenges

Navigating an unprecedented period of federal Medicaid policy uncertainty is the defining challenge right now. The federal budget landscape in 2025 and beyond has created real threats to Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands of people in Hawaii — and the consequences of getting it wrong are real. There are people losing access to care, and whole healthcare ecosystems are becoming more fragile.

On a practical level, that means constantly translating complex and rapidly evolving policy changes and proposals for many different audiences at once — members, providers, community partners, legislators, health centers — while simultaneously advancing coordinated advocacy and collective action to advance our shared interests and goals. One piece of that has been the successful launch and ongoing convening of the Hawaii Healthcare Safety Net Coalition as a space to keep stakeholders up to speed on policy changes. A second major piece is working across external community-based organizations and community healthcare providers to support and empower low-income communities to not only keep their coverage but also take meaningful steps to engage in their healthcare. We’ve done it before, but the current challenges make even more important this incredibly exciting work across external partners, which requires ongoing collaboration, trust building and creating space for organizations to work together on shared priorities.

Hawaii also presents unique structural challenges: geographic isolation; specialist shortages, especially on the neighbor islands; and a healthcare market small enough that the economics of care delivery look very different than the mainland.

Use of AI

We’re approaching AI [artificial intelligence] thoughtfully and practically, focused on where it can genuinely improve outcomes for members, not just reduce costs. In our external affairs and communications work, I encourage our teams to leverage AI tools for rapid synthesis of lengthy documents, tracking policy and landscape developments across multiple fronts simultaneously, and drafting initial versions of work product to refine with business and community context.

More broadly, AlohaCare is exploring how AI-assisted tools can support care coordination — helping identify members who may need outreach, flagging gaps in care and enabling our teams to work more efficiently. This helps our teams spend more time on building relationships and connections with our stakeholders, which technology can’t replace.

In a state with provider shortages and serious access challenges, better information-sharing tools can genuinely improve health outcomes. We’re also mindful of equity implications, ensuring that AI tools don’t introduce or amplify disparities for the populations we serve.

Top priority

Our top priority is ensuring access to quality care by protecting coverage. With federal Medicaid policy in flux and potential eligibility changes on the horizon, AlohaCare’s most urgent work is ensuring that our approximately 65,000 members retain access to the coverage they depend on and that the broader Medicaid system in Hawaii remains stable.

That means proactive community education and outreach, especially around eligibility redetermination processes that can cause people to lose coverage, not because they’re ineligible but because of administrative hurdles. It means continued coalition building and policy advocacy at the state and federal levels. And it means demonstrating through data, stories and relationships that Medicaid is not a line item to be cut. It is a lifeline.

Concurrently, I want to see AlohaCare deepen its integration with community-based partners to address the social determinants of health that drive so much of the disparity, ranging from housing, food security, transportation and behavioral health. The health plan model has a real opportunity to be an anchor institution for whole-person, community-centered care.

Recommended book, article, podcast, TV show or documentary

I’m a fan of “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz. While it’s not a healthcare book, its core principles — being impeccable with your word, not taking things personally, avoiding assumptions and always doing your best — are powerful tools for any leader, especially working in a mission-driven organization in an industry as highly matrixed and regulated as healthcare. Working in managed care, health policy and relationship-based community-facing environments where communication, empathy and resilience matter deeply, these four agreements offer a fundamental framework for building trust, fostering collaboration and sustaining our own well-being. Adopting these values helps us navigate complex relationships and challenging situations with clarity and integrity, ultimately supporting better outcomes for the people and communities we serve.

Making U.S. healthcare less expensive

The short answer is that we pay more for almost everything, from administrative overhead to pharmaceuticals to specialist care to hospital services, without proportionally better outcomes. A lot of that is structural. We have a fragmented multipayer system with enormous administrative complexity that consumes a significant share of every healthcare dollar before it reaches a patient. We have pharmaceutical pricing that is largely unchecked by government negotiation. We have a specialist-heavy care model that incentivizes high-cost interventions over primary and preventive care. And we have deep, persistent inequities in who gets access to care at all.

What should be done? A few things stand out. Serious investment in primary care — both in training and reimbursement — would reduce costly downstream care. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices more aggressively (a process that has only recently and modestly begun) would meaningfully reduce costs. And simplifying the administrative requirements that consume enormous resources across payers, providers and patients would free up capacity for actual care.

You can’t solve the cost problem without addressing equity. The populations who bear the worst health outcomes — and who rely most heavily on safety net programs like Medicaid — often lack access to the preventive care and social supports that keep people healthy. Investing in those communities isn’t charity; it’s good healthcare economics.

Personal goal

One of my goals this year is to find more balance and spend additional quality time with family and friends. Amidst the challenging demands of my job and the importance of our mission, it’s easy to let personal connections take a back seat. I want to be more intentional about nurturing those relationships, ensuring that I make space for the people who ground and inspire me outside of work.

Culturally, I also want to be more intentional about deepening my connection to Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander language and culture. Having the privilege to live in Hawaii, I am surrounded by vibrant communities with rich traditions, histories and languages. Embracing and learning more [about] ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language) and the diverse cultures across the Pacific is a way to honor the people and place I now call home. This connection strengthens my sense of community and identity, and I hope to carry it forward as I live and work in this beautiful place.