SECTION 1.

 The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) Chronic health conditions impact up to one-third of California children. Chronic health conditions are those that last more than 12 months and are severe enough to create some limitations in usual activity.

(b) Chronic conditions that begin in childhood, such as asthma, diabetes, vaping-related diseases, dental caries, and depression, can last throughout the lifetime and significantly impact health, productivity, and health care costs in adulthood.

(c) Toxic stress in childhood, or adverse childhood experiences, have been shown to significantly increase the risk of chronic diseases. For example, a person with four or more adverse childhood experiences is three times more likely to suffer from depression and 2.2 times more likely to have heart disease.

(d) Chronic health conditions can rob children and families of their well-being by draining time, money, and energy from families. These chronic issues also contribute to problems with school readiness and academic outcomes.

(e) Childhood is an opportune time to intervene with health problems or habits, not only to help change the trajectory of children’s development, but also to lead to a healthier adult population. California’s failure to focus on children’s health and prevention ignores the potential to address medical and behavioral precursors to later diseases, which are costly in terms of dollars and human suffering. Childhood chronic health conditions add preventable burden and cost to the health care system.

(f) Chronic disease is the top cost driver in the health care system.

(g) Due to historic and ongoing underinvestment and disenfranchisement, as well as the impacts of systemic racism in the health care system and throughout society, childhood chronic conditions disproportionately impact children of color, especially Black, Latino, and Native American children. For example, asthma is three times more deadly for Black children as for White children; Latino children in California are significantly more likely to have a history of tooth decay and untreated tooth decay than White children; and Native American children reported higher than average rates of depression-related feelings on school surveys.

(h) The Let’s Get Healthy California effort expressed the commitment of our state to promote healthier and more equitable communities. A new initiative is needed to build on these ideas and ensure the state is accountable for outcomes-focused action to improve children’s well-being.

(i) Accordingly, California will take affirmative antiracist and prohealth action to support the well-being of children and reduce racial disparities in chronic childhood health conditions. This means California will recognize, in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Health in All Policies framework, that both individual and population health outcomes are impacted by a multitude of factors beyond health care and often beyond the scope of traditional public health activities. Historic and current unequal distribution of social, political, economic, and environmental resources, institutionalized racism, and other unjust conditions all contribute to health disparities. This also means that California will recognize and acknowledge that the current norm of policies and programs treating all racial and ethnic groups the same and that the inaction of not actively and affirmatively developing policies and programs with the goal to reduce health inequities by race and ethnicity are themselves a form of institutionalized racism. These norms and inaction exacerbate existing health disparities. California will actively and affirmatively center its disparity-reduction strategies in developing, implementing, and evaluating policies and programs, with the ultimate goals of eliminating differences in health outcomes across all race and ethnicity groups.