Too many North Carolinians are struggling to afford their health care. Governor Stein is using every tool at his disposal to protect North Carolinians’ access to health care, bring costs down, and invest in healthier families.

In 2025, the Stein administration:

Took On the High Cost of Health Care

• Relieved more than $6.5 billion in medical debt for more than 2.5 million North Carolinians, in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services and the national nonprofit Undue Medical Debt
• Championed Medicaid expansion, which has provided health insurance coverage to more than 700,000 North Carolinians in two years
• Signed legislation protecting consumers from rising prescription drug costs and passing prescription drug price savings on to consumers rather than allowing the middlemen to grab the profits

Invested in Mental Health

• Recommended sweeping investments in mental health care to keep people healthy and safe
• Opened six Behavioral Health Urgent Care facilities across the state
• Opened 16 new facility-based crisis beds
• Launched 12 child crisis teams to support children and adolescents experiencing behavioral health crises
• Launched a new co-response team and onboarded two more teams across the state to supply violence prevention and behavioral health crisis response services to local communities

Supported Families

• Contributed $22 million from public and private partners to fight hunger across the state when the federal government shutdown impacted SNAP benefits in November 2025
• Provided more than $126 million in benefits through the SUN Bucks nutrition program to feed more than 1 million school-age children in North Carolina during the summer of 2025
• Signed an executive order to protect women’s reproductive freedom, direct cabinet agencies to safeguard medical privacy, ensure women receive accurate information about their pregnancies, and protect providers providing lawful reproductive health care
• Launched the Children and Families Specialty Plan, a first-of-its-kind statewide health plan to provide comprehensive physical and mental health services for Medicaid-enrolled children, youths, and young adults currently and formerly served by the child welfare system
• Launched PATH NC, a statewide digital system for child welfare staff to serve foster children across counties
• Signed legislation that strengthens our child welfare system, protects our most vulnerable children, and helps more children stay with family members
• Established the North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education, which is putting forward recommendations for expanding access to high-quality child care, lowering child care costs for families, and strengthening the early childhood education workforce
• Partnered with 16 North Carolina institutions of higher learning to establish “Child Care Academies” that get people into the child care workforce faster – a task force recommendation
• Proposed cutting up to half a billion dollars in taxes for families with a Child Tax Credit, Child and Dependent Care Tax Cut, and Working Families Tax Cut

Promoted Public Health

• Joined 14 governors in the Governors Public Health Alliance to improve public health coordination
• Issued standing orders that ensured access to the COVID-19 vaccine for more than 80,000 North Carolinians
• Signed legislation that strengthened North Carolina’s Medicaid program by making permanent coverage for women through the first year of their babies’ lives and making telehealth services more accessible
• Invested $25 million into funding new trail development and extending existing trails across North Carolina
• Reopened all state parks damaged by Hurricane Helene