The House of Delegates signed off on a bill aimed at preventing the state’s rates of chronic disease and improving nutrition and physical activity.
House Bill 4982, the Make West Virginia Healthy Act of 2026, would give the existing Office of Healthy Lifestyles “teeth” and “guardrails,” lead sponsor Del. Evan Worrell, R-Cabell, told House members. The bill passed with a vote of 91 to 4 and four members absent.
“We all know the numbers,” Worrell said. “We know the people behind them. West Virginia leads the nation in chronic disease, disability, preventable illness and that’s not a talking point. We’re talking about our neighbors, more specifically our workforce, and definitely our Medicaid budget.”
“What this bill is is coordination, accountability and a return on investment,” he said. “Right now, we’re spending billions treating diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, related illness after they’ve wrecked lives and wrecked budgets. Medicaid bears the cost a lot of times good employers and definitely taxpayers. And so a simple question, why are we paying more later when we can pay less earlier?”
House Bill 4982 would require the Office of Healthy Lifestyles under the Department of Health to work with the state Department of Education to develop and implement plans to improve students’ nutrition and physical fitness.
The office would work with the Department of Education and Agriculture to study the health impact of food additives and dyes, and create a plan to improve access to fresh-local food. It would also establish a farm-to-school program.
The state Department of Education would be required to provide the Office of Healthy Lifestyles with metrics about students’ physical activity participation, aerobic capacity, strength and flexibility.
“We’re going to focus on physical fitness, but not punishment,” Worrell said. “Kids won’t lose recess for bad grades. Schools with limited resources get flexibility, and students with IEPs are protected.
“And the data we’re collecting, well, it’s anonymous, but it’s aggregated. It’s used for one purpose only,” Worrell said. “That’s to know whether what we’re doing is actually working and if it doesn’t work, we can change it. That’s accountability.”
The bill would also require the state Department of Education to reestablish the Presidential Fitness Test.
Curtis Capehart, Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s director of policy, said re-establishing the fitness test would help West Virginia in its continued application for funding under the five-year, $50 billion federal Rural Health Transformation Program.
The Trump administration announced last year it had awarded West Virginia nearly $199 million under the federal health program. The federal government will continue to evaluate the state for whether it’s meeting goals over the five years of the program with the possibility of clawing back money or awarding more. Implementing the Presidential Fitness Test, a priority for the Trump administration, will help the state score higher on future evaluations and increase its chances of continued funding, Capehart told lawmakers.
The bill also establishes a Food is Medicine program under the state’s Medicaid program, which would authorize nutrition based interventions as a way to improve health outcomes and reduce avoidable medical utilization, according to the bill.
It would require the Office of Healthy Lifestyles to develop a county grant program to help further the goals of this office in promoting healthy lifestyles for West Virginia residents, the bill says.
Del. Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, said she likes a lot of the bill, but does not support mandating the Presidential Fitness Test, which she said was a failure. The Obama administration ended the test in 2013, replacing it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, according to reporting by Education Week.
“I want kids to be as healthy as they possibly can,” Young said. “This is a standardized test that gives you a snapshot in time, and quite frankly, I don’t know about y’all, but when I had to take it growing up, it created a lot of shame, a lot of trauma, and a lot of kids crying because they can’t do all the pull ups.
“And I just wish that we would actually invest in social determinants of health so we can create healthy children and help them, rather than to shame them into having to do a mile run in under six minutes, or whatever it is,” she said.
The bill will next go to the Senate for consideration.
This article originally appeared on West Virginia Watch.
West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.
