New Medicaid plan aims to untangle care for NC foster children.
After years of planning, the state has launched a specialized plan to reduce strain on families and county agencies working in child welfare.
by Jaymie Baxley December 19, 2025
Gaile Osborne, a foster parent and the executive director of Foster Family Alliance of NC, speaks at the state legislative building in 2021. Osborne and other child welfare advocates spent years pushing for the recently launched Children and Families Specialty Plan. Credit: Rose Hoban/NC Health News
After years of pleading from the child welfare community, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services recently rolled out a Medicaid plan that’s designed to simplify care for children and young adults in the child welfare system — a population that state officials say has long struggled to navigate a fragmented health care landscape.
About 32,000 children in foster care and former foster youth were automatically enrolled in the state’s Children and Families Specialty Plan when it launched on Dec. 1. Among other things, the program aims to prevent disruptions in services for children who had been receiving care in a different county before they entered the foster system.
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