Official Arguments (click ▸ to expand)
🚫 San Francisco Chronicle
"The lives of some 80,000 Californians with kidney failure depend on dialysis, which typically entails three treatments a week lasting four hours each. That they are at the center of a battle over financial spoils for the second time in as many years is an unfortunate comment on the nation’s health care system as well as the state’s initiative process. Vote no in the hope of discouraging any further reliance on this tactic."
🚫 The San Diego Union-Tribune
"The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board acknowledges how much unions have helped their members, but their negotiations — and life or death medical decisions — shouldn’t spill over into the voting public and the state’s initiative process. That’s an abuse of power. Voters should send a clear message not to try this again. No on Proposition 23."
🤐 American Civil Liberties Union SoCal
No stance published.
🚫 Los Angeles Times
"For the second time in two years, California voters will be asked to play the role of healthcare regulators and set rules for how dialysis clinics operate in this state. And once again, they’ll be offered a seemingly appealing way to make clinics safer. But just as they smartly rejected a ballot measure in 2018 that sought to increase clinics’ spending on nurses and technicians, they should reject an initiative this year to increase clinics’ spending on doctors. Proposition 23 — like Proposition 8 in 2018 — would raise costs without delivering a meaningful improvement in the quality of care."
🚫 The Mercury News
"Just as they did two years ago, leaders of a large labor union are trying to use a statewide election to go after the kidney dialysis industry. California voters saw through the political blackmail by the Service Employees International Union in 2018, when 60% of voters rejected Proposition 8, a misguided effort to regulate the industry. ... Votes should send union leaders a strong signal that nuisance ballot measures have no business being on the California ballot."
🚫 Orange County Register
"So this isn’t about Californians’ well-being. The ballot measure wasn’t created by dialysis patients upset by their healthcare options. Its backer is SEIU-UHW West, a healthcare workers’ labor union that has not been successful in organizing employees in dialysis clinics. Its electoral plan is apparently to make the two companies that own most of the state’s clinics spend so much money fighting ballot initiatives every two years that they have a hard time staying in business. That kind of chicanery makes a mockery of California’s initiative system and of your time as a citizen and voter."
🚫 The Desert Sun
“State voters are not equipped to effectively regulate what is indeed a life-saving procedure for some 80,000 of their fellow Californians. Those responsibilities must be left to lawmakers and state and federal regulators. If reforms are needed in this industry, then they must flow from those best able to vet them rather than from the ballot box.
This type of nuisance initiative only serves to increase skepticism about California’s initiative process. Vote “no” on Proposition 23 to send a strong message against such cynical tactics.”
✅ California Democratic Party
"Improves safety and prohibits discrimination in dialysis clinics to protect gravely ill patients."
🚫 Republican Party
"No on Prop 23 – New Dialysis Bureaucracy Increases Health Care Costs
Prop 23 forces unnecessary regulations and costs on dialysis clinics -- shutting nearly half of them down and putting countless patients’ lives at risk."