NC looks to let parents keep health coverage while they try to get custody of their kids
Parents whose children have temporarily been taken into state custody will still qualify for Medicaid in North Carolina under a bill making its way through the state legislature.
The proposed legislation, which has support from Senate Republicans and Democrats, swiftly passed the second committee to consider it Tuesday. It has several more stops to make before it hits the governor’s desk, but the bipartisan support the bill has garnered so far indicates it shouldn’t face major roadblocks, barring any changes.
If signed into law, parents would be able to more easily receive medical care, including court-ordered substance abuse and mental health treatment that they need to be successfully reunified with their children, said Sen. Danny Britt, a Republican from Lumberton who is sponsoring Senate Bill 93.
Currently, parents whose children are temporarily removed lose their Medicaid coverage.
“Children are removed, placed in foster care for all the right reasons — primarily safety,” Superior Court Judge J. Stanley Carmical said in a commitee hearing Tuesday.
At the same time, Carmical said, his rule no. 1 is “show up for treatment.” But parents have a harder time doing that when they’ve lost Medicaid coverage, he said.
“If there was ever a bill whose short title perfectly describes what the outcome would be if this bill is enacted, it’s ‘Assisting North Carolina Families in Crisis’, and we’re in the midst of that,” Carmical said.
Advocates of the legislation say it also supports the state’s goal of reunifying children with their families.
Britt, who said he has worked as an attorney in abuse and neglect cases, invited Valerie Comrie, a program director from Robeson County Family Treatment Court, to speak during the committee hearing Tuesday.
“We had a mom who lost her Medicaid. She was on suboxone; she ended up on crack cocaine,” Comrie said. Suboxone is a prescription drug used to treat adults who are addicted to opioids. “She was homeless, living outside of a car. She was stealing. She was doing things that she would never do. All because she lost her Medicaid and the ability to pay for those suboxone strips that really helped her to thrive and do well. She was on track to get her children back.”
Britt expanded the bill to apply to more parents in an amendment that passed Tuesday. Previously, the bill would have covered only parents who needed substance abuse or mental health treatment. Now the legislation applies to all parents whose children are temporarily taken into state custody, or foster care.
The previous version of the bill received wide support from Democrats and Republicans, but some worried that the change might not have been approved by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which must approve all state changes to North Carolina’s Medicaid program, according to legislators.
The new version of the bill is expected to be more easily approved by the agency.
”If our statutory goal is reunification, then we need to do everything we can to ensure that while these parents are on a timeline to go through these steps to reunify that we don’t do anything to throw not only the parent farther off course, but more importantly, these children farther and farther off course from a sense of stability,” Britt said in an interview with The News & Observer last week.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Megaphone or wherever you get your podcasts.
