Kody Kinsley is senior policy advisor at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Solutions and a visiting senior fellow for The Century Foundation’s Health Reform Initiative. Kinsley served as North Carolina’s Secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services from 2022 to early 2025. During his tenure, he played a pivotal role in expanding Medicaid through bipartisan collaboration, resulting in over 715,000 North Carolinians gaining coverage. He secured a historic $835 million investment in behavioral health to transform care and improve access, and led a push among state health secretaries to call on the FDA to update discriminatory blood donation policies for gay men. Kinsley also pioneered a first-in-the-nation medical debt relief program, which relieved $6.5 billion in debt for over 2.5 million people at no cost to the state, while reforming hospital billing and charity care practices to prevent the debt from accumulating in the future. His career includes serving as a Presidential appointee of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and in roles at the White House and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
