Nancy Hoyt Taff, M.P.H., Video Interview | 2025 MHE Emerging Leaders in Healthcare

Nancy Hoyt Taff, M.P.H., is the senior product manager of Medicaid at UCare, an independent, nonprofit health plan providing healthcare and administrative services to more than 600,000 members throughout Minnesota and parts of western Wisconsin. As one of this year’s Managing Healthcare Executive Emerging Leaders in Healthcare, she recently sat down to discuss a turning point in her career, what she would change about U.S. healthcare and her personal goal for this year.

During her time at AmeriCorps VISTA, Hoyt Taff supervised a garden crew of multicultural high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota. The students would often talk about the diverse and nutritious food they liked to eat with their families. However, Hoyt Taff noticed the food they ate at school was often processed. When she asked the students why, one of the girls replied that processed foods were the only ones available at the food shelf. This realization made Hoyt Taff pursue a career in public health.

Hoyt Taff shared that there isn't one thing that she'd change about U.S. healthcare; there are many. “We really need to do just a total overhaul, and that's obviously not easy and maybe not feasible, but we really need leaders who can just dig in, make it happen and figure out what works,” Hoyt Taff said in a video interview. “We need to move away from a system that incentivizes financial gain and penalizes people who are sick and move towards a system that is designed to improve people's health and communities’ health, because that is not where we are today. We need some radical change in order to get there.”

Summer is Hoyt Taff's favorite time of year, and with two young children, she said she will be extra busy. A family vacation plan is in the works, and although she doesn’t have a specific destination in mind, "it will definitely include swimming, scooting and beautiful scenery."