Democrats running for governor talk solutions on child care, women's health care

Lia Russell, The Sacramento Bee on Feb 18, 2026

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A handful of Democratic candidates running for governor addressed how they would make life for Californians more affordable by outlining their ideas to lower costs for necessities like child care and health care.

The Democratic Legislative Women’s Caucus held a forum Wednesday for gubernatorial candidates on women’s economic security, health and safety at the Crest Theater in downtown Sacramento.

Former Attorney General Xavier Becerra, former Assembly Majority Leader Ian Calderon, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, and former State Controller Betty Yee were in attendance. The filing deadline is in March, and the primary is June 2.

Moderator Daniela Pardo, a staffer for Senate President pro Tem Monique Limon, grilled each candidate on their policy ideas for how they would ensure working parents could afford child care.

There’s agreement on subsidizing child care providers

All candidates agreed that the state needed to further subsidize child care providers and extend family leave but offered varying answers on how to fund those priorities.

Thurmond came out in favor of taxing billionaires, an idea that has picked up steam as populist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, kicked off a health care union-led campaign in Los Angeles to put a related proposal levying a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ assets on the ballot. “I‘m supporting this new health care billionaires tax because we know that hospitals are going to close, emergency rooms are going to close, and people are going to be left without care.,” Thurmond said. “Their premiums in the Affordable Care Act are going to go up, and we’re going to see Californians who are going to be in dangerous situations at the end of the day.”

He went on to say he’d enact a single-payer health care system if elected.

Mahan, the most recent entrant in the race, has come out as one of the loudest critics of the proposal to tax billionaires, which many of his Silicon Valley backers oppose. He pointed out that California is already a progressively taxing state and said he believed the solution should be closing existing tax loopholes.

“It doesn’t mean I won’t support targeted revenue increases, but I don’t think that (taxation) can be our primary answer,” he said.

Calderon, Becerra and Mahan floated ideas like investing more state funds to increase child care providers’ wages for programs like Head Start, a federal early childhood care program.

Calderon also said he would cap child care costs at $500 per month for 95% of children from newborns to 5 years old.

“My budget will be a statement of my values,” he said.

Yee said she would work with the business community to restructure child care programs and how they’re subsidized. She said the Newsom administration’s expansion of universal pre-kindergarten destabilized the rest of the child care sector as private providers have lost out as parents of 4-year-olds have taken advantage of free transitional options.

“When we enacted TK (transitional kindergarten), we destabilized the child care system,” Yee said, “Because what we should have done with TK was to think about, ‘how do we incorporate the child care providers in the system now so that we’re actually building a lasting system where we’re uplifting everyone in the process?’”

All candidates said they would continue California’s investments in women’s health are programs like Planned Parenthood, whose clinics often serves as a medical stopgap or last resort for low-income women and those who live in rural areas.

The organization received a $90 million infusion in state funds last week as H.R. 1, a congressional bill that strips most states of federal funds for health care and other programs, is set to take effect.

At the end, the candidates took questions from the audience. One college student asked how they would protect members of the transgender community, as President Donald Trump has tried to withhold federal funds from the state after California refused to repeal its anti-discrimination law.

Becerra said he was “raked over the coals” for protecting transgender health care when he served as former President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services secretary.

“What drove us, what drove us, was the science, not the politics. And so we relied on what the medical associations, the medical experts, said was the right way to do health care,” he said. “And that’s what we’ll do, as governor, we will protect the rights of every Californian to stand up and live a full life.”