Union drops controversial ballot initiatives in exchange for concessions from California Hospital Association

The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) has dropped its campaign for voter-passed laws that would have limited what California hospitals could charge their patients and what they could pay their executives. In return, the SEIU-UHW got the California Hospital Association (CHA) and its member hospitals to agree to a code of conduct that should make it easier for the union to organize hospital workers.

In addition, the SEIU-UHW and CHA agreed to a more civil discourse about their disagreements and to work together on lobbying and possibly voter ballot initiatives to force the state to increase Medi-Cal rates. Medi-Cal, the California version of Medicaid, has some of the lowest rates in the nation, and the state’s hospitals have long complained that this forces them to shift costs onto privately insured patients and limits what they can pay their staff.

The agreement also creates a $100-million fund for joint political advocacy, according to the LA Times. However, neither side would disclose how much each was contributing to the fund.

The SEIU-UHW has used ballot initiatives that threaten hospitals to force agreements in the past, most recently in 2012. California law makes passing laws by ballot initiative relatively simple, which means that any ballot initiative put forth by the SEIU-UHW will get hospitals’ attention.

To put a proposed state law up for direct consideration by California voters, one only needs to present a petition with valid signatures amounting to 5 percent of the number of people who voted for governor in the last gubernatorial election and a $200 filling fee that is refunded if the initiative makes it onto the ballot. Currently the amount of signatures needed is 504,760, or about 1.3 percent of the state’s total population. Once on the ballot, the proposal will become law if it receives a simple majority of yes votes among those who voted yes or no on the initiative.

Two proposals that tap into public frustration about healthcare costs and executive pay, and also don’t increase taxes, may have had a fair chance of passing. However, if the initiatives had passed, the impact on hospitals’ finances would have hurt SEIU-UHW hospital workers just as much as the hospitals that employ them, making it somewhat questionable whether passage of the initiatives was ever the SEIU-UHW’s real goal.