California voters have rejected Proposition 23, according to the Associated Press. If passed, the measure would have required dialysis clinics to have a doctor on site during all operating hours and to report infection data to the state.
The defeat comes as no surprise after the opposition, led by the two largest dialysis companies in the country — DaVita and Fresenius — invested more than $104 million into defeating the measure.
Proponents of the measure, the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), put up roughly $9 million in support.
Prop. 23 was the latest effort by the SEIU to influence health care policy through ballot initiatives. In the last five years, the union had been trying to organize workers at dialysis clinics, without success. It sponsored a similar initiative in 2018 to limit profits at the clinics, which the dialysis companies also spent heavily to defeat. When that was voted down, the union went to work almost immediately on Proposition 23, with the intention of writing an initiative that would be easier for voters to understand and more appealing.
Their strategy, however, appeared to fail, with 63.1% of voters opposing the measure as of Tuesday evening.
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