By U T Editorial Board
When progressive reformers launched California’s version of direct democracy in 1911, the hopes were high that the public would use initiatives that qualified for the ballot by meeting signature-gathering requirements to force change on a Legislature subservient to special interests, starting with the Southern Pacific Railroad.
Instead, over the past 50 years, special interests have emerged as the biggest users of direct democracy. They do so to secure favors directly — through successful ballot measures — or indirectly, by threatening to fund initiatives that lawmakers bitterly oppose unless the governor and Legislature make major concessions.
Over the past decade, however, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) has pioneered perhaps the most obnoxious use yet of the initiative process: using it to smear whole wings of the health care industry as dangerously incompetent and in need of government microregulation.
In elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022, the union sponsored initiatives revising dialysis clinic rules that would have sharply raised operating costs and forced many clinics to close, putting many of the state’s 80,000 dialysis patients at risk of kidney failure.
Why would SEIU-UHW do so?
Because the companies that run most clinics in the state — DaVita and Fresenius Medical Care — oppose the union’s efforts to organize clinic workers. This may not fit the definition of blackmail in a court of law, but that is what it is.
Despite going 0 for 3, SEIU-UHW is back at it this election with Proposition 44, which makes the same false claims about the alleged shortcomings of hundreds of nonprofit community health clinics — used by millions of Californians — as the union did about dialysis clinics. It does so for the same reason: to force the clinics — those run by San Ysidro Health are prominent local examples — to let the union organize their workers.
No wonder virtually every significant health organization in the state — starting with the California Medical Association and the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics — opposes the devastatingly costly rules the measure would impose on the clinics. No wonder that even the California Democratic Party — normally closely allied with unions — wanted nothing to do with gutting the state’s health safety net. They don’t want people to die.
The proudly militant SEIU-UHW is also behind Proposition 40 — the “billionaires tax” on the November ballot that would recklessly create huge incentives for entrepreneurs to abandon California.
Proposition 44 would also be a severe blow to the state’s well-being. Vote against it to take a stand against health care chaos.