https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2025\/11\/08\/healthy-opportunities-pilot-medicaid-north-carolina-maha-00626465<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“After a few months in the program, Smith was no longer diabetic, and she has now been sober for two and a half years.
\nHer story highlights the success of the Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which launched in North Carolina in March 2022. The program had benefits beyond health and quality-of-life improvements; researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill found the program saved $1,020 a year per recipient on health care costs, and the 38,000 participants had \u201csignificantly lower\u201d emergency room visits than their peers.<\/p>\n
The program was unique, funded with a five-year, $650 million federal grant approved by the first Donald Trump administration. The idea was to use fresh food, safe housing and transportation \u2014 social and economic factors that researchers say determine 80 percent of a person\u2019s health \u2014 to improve the lives of the sickest, most expensive patients.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
But the Healthy Opportunities Pilot shows the limits of such food-based interventions in public policy. These programs often require longer-term investments, chafing against the cost-cutting instincts that characterize Trump\u2019s second term and legislatures in most red states \u2014 the policy level at which most MAHA ideas are put into practice.<\/p>\n
In the case of HOP, the Joe Biden administration approved a Medicaid waiver last December to continue the program in North Carolina, which Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, hoped to expand throughout the state over the next two years. But in June, the Republican-led state legislature declined to fund it. State lawmakers argue the program costs more than it saves \u2014 a claim that state policy experts dispute because of the way Republican lawmakers were calculating the numbers. These experts say the long-term savings potential was given short shrift.”<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2025\/11\/08\/healthy-opportunities-pilot-medicaid-north-carolina-maha-00626465<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[725,81,334,73,341,411,676,707],"class_list":["post-20442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-food","tag-health","tag-health-insurance","tag-healthcare","tag-medicaid","tag-policy","tag-poor","tag-poverty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20443,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20442\/revisions\/20443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}