The Child Health and Disability Prevention Program
In December 1988 Nielsen, Merksamer had recommended to the Tobacco Institute that the Child Health and Disability Prevention (CHDP)
CHDP originated in 1973, when the California Children's Lobby approached Assembly Member Willie Brown and his staff member Steve Thompson about creating a program that would offer free health screens to all children, not just poor ones.[10] At the time, children's advocates were dissatisfied with California's implementation of the federal child health screening program, Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Prevention. The federal program had been set up in California as a welfare program rather than a health program, and it provided mass screenings by paraprofessionals instead of doctors, which the medical establishment did not like. In addition, the screenings were divorced from the provision of medical care and providers were reimbursed at very low rates, which reduced the incentive to provide services. Brown and Thompson created CHDP to solve these problems.
CHDP was to be administered by the health department, not welfare, and incorporate doctors into program delivery.[10] The CMA and the California chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics supported this program. Once the costs of implementing the full program were clear, however, the target population was “temporarily” redefined to be children between the ages of four and six whose family incomes were no more than twice the poverty level; only the costs of screening, not treatment, were covered.[10] When Proposition 99 passed in 1988, CHDP was a popular program with strong political backing that needed money to be more fully implemented. Using the Health Education Account to finance CHDP would advance the policy agenda of important legislators, provide money for doctors, and reduce funds for programs that could damage the tobacco industry.