Assembly Subcommittee No. 1 Hears CDPH State of the State’s Public Health and DHCS Proposition 56 Items

On Monday, the Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 1 on Health and Human Services began their work to hear budget issues related to the various departments. This hearing featured a State of the State’s Public Health by Dr. Karen Smith, State Health Officer and Director of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and a budget overview and miscellaneous issues under the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS).

Dr. Smith provided a handout to highlighting the various ways to view the health status of Californians, including number of deaths, premature deaths, greatest percentage increase in deaths, disparity ratios, years lived disability and/or infectious disease. She noted that chronic diseases accounted for 75 percent of all deaths in our state. She also shared unsettling statistics including one-third of California’s children are overweight, the prevalence of diabetes has increased 37 percent and that 46 percent of adults are prediabetic. In highlighting significant threats to public health, Dr. Smith described the opioid epidemic, rising rates of suicide and alarming rates of sexually transmitted diseases in California.

Items discussed under DHCS included an overview of the department’s budget and Medi-Cal estimate, recommendations from the AB 340 Workgroup and proposals related to Proposition 56 Tobacco Tax revenues. Of interest, the Governor’s proposals to provide $30 million for developmental screening for children and $23 million for trauma screenings for children and adults were included under the Proposition 56 discussion.

All items were held open.

The agenda and materials can be found here.