L.A. County offers health services job to San Francisco’s health chief

Los Angeles County supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to offer Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, head of San Francisco’s public health department, the job of leading L.A. County’s massive and long-troubled health services department, a move that could bring to a close a two-year search.

Katz, 50, said he plans to accept the job. He was told of the vote by e-mail in Seattle where he was giving a presentation on his work on Healthy San Francisco, a program to provide healthcare to the uninsured.

“I’m very excited, I’m very honored, I’m very pleased. With the people I have met in L.A. who are really good people, we can have a transformation of the L.A. health service system,” Katz told The Times. “It will be a system of choice that people choose because it’s the best place to get care.”

Katz is still negotiating a compensation package with county officials. If negotiations go well, supervisors could approve a contract as early as next week, and Katz would be expected to start work in January.

Most people who arrive at a county hospital or clinic are there not by choice but because the county facilities are a place of last resort for the poor uninsured and the critically or traumatically ill.

Katz will be entrusted with guiding a department that became infamous nationwide for running the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, an urban hospital that placed patients in danger of serious injury and death so often that it had to be shut down.

The county health system continues to face tough times. The decision to build a smaller replacement for the county flagship hospital, Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, has resulted in chronic severe overcrowding. On Tuesday, The Times reported that state health regulators found that Olive View- UCLA Medical Center, another county facility, put critically ill babies at risk by caring for them despite lacking the staff to do so.

And with President Obama’s healthcare plan looming in 2014, which will expand health insurance to the poor, county officials are concerned that federal money now funding county health operations will follow newly insured patients to private hospitals.

Supervisors said Tuesday that they believe Katz is the best person for the job. They voted 4 to 0 to authorize William T Fujioka, the county’s chief executive, to negotiate a salary and benefits for Katz, with Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas not present for the closed-session vote.

“I was very impressed with how hands-on he is,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina, noting that Katz wants to practice medicine and see patients one day a month should he come to L.A.

Molina said Katz had the potential to bring strong leadership to the department, which in the past has been managed by people, she said, who have misinformed the supervisors and sugar-coated bad news.

“There’s a lot of bad news to be had,” Molina said. “There are just so many issues.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said of Katz: “He impresses me as a leader who can inspire the troops.”

Katz was hired by San Francisco’s public health department in 1991 and served as chief of research and director of the AIDS Office, director of the Emergency Medical Services Agency and director of the department’s health and safety branch before becoming chief in 1997.

A Brooklyn native who trained at UC San Francisco Medical Center, Katz has Ivy League credentials (Yale and Harvard Medical School) and extensive hands-on experience as a doctor and longtime public health official. He has been widely acknowledged as one of the architects of Healthy San Francisco, among the first municipal universal healthcare programs in the country.

Molina was enthusiastic about the universal healthcare program.

“You have to have a healthcare system that’s going to take all comers,” Molina said. “He’s looking at those ideas … it really requires a system that’s going to be responsive to the needs of patients.”

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

ron.lin@latimes.com