Perspectives: How Will This Year’s Crop Of Ballot Initiatives Impact California?
A selection of opinions on health care developments from around the state.
Los Angeles Times:
Can How You Vote In The Midterms Bring Down The Cost Of Health Care?
If you’re equally perplexed by whether your vote can influence healthcare prices, here are some things to consider. ... There’s no magic pill to fix these systemic problems or flatten healthcare’s rate of inflation. Political candidates nevertheless vow to cure our healthcare woes (painlessly). The truth is, campaign promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver. Democrats promising “Medicare for all” can’t deliver “free” healthcare because it’ll be too expensive and overtax the middle class. Republicans are promising affordable “short-term” insurance plans that sidestep the Affordable Care Act requirements, but these plans are thin on coverage and big on risk. (Robert Pearl, 11/2)
San Francisco Chronicle:
S.F. Mayor Backs Props. 1, 2 To Create Affordable Housing
This November, voters have the opportunity to do exactly that. We can support California Proposition 1, the Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act, and Proposition 2, the No Place Like Home initiative. Both create the affordable housing that children, families, veterans, people with disabilities and those experiencing homelessness need. (London Breed, 11/1)
Fresno Bee:
Proposition 4 Would Help Valley Children’s Hospital
Proposition 4 is an investment in the collective heath of kids across California and here in our Valley. Please join me in voting yes on Proposition 4 this November. (Todd Suntrapak, 10/26)
San Jose Mercury News:
Prop. 4 Will Boost State's 13 Children's Hospitals
Protecting the most vulnerable children in our community begins with ensuring that every child receives the care they need, including those with the most complex conditions. To ensure that happens, we, the voters, must make a stand this November by voting “yes” on Proposition 4, the children’s hospital bond. (Alexandria Felton, 10/26)
Los Angeles Times:
Dialysis Companies' Anti-Proposition 8 Fight Has Gone Over The Top — In Self-Interested Campaign Spending
As we have learned from bitter experience over the years, in California’s ballot initiative process, money talks. On Proposition 8, which aims to rein in profits of the kidney dialysis industry, it’s been screaming at top volume. The for-profit dialysis industry just set an all-time record in spending, bringing its total war chest to defeat the measure to more than $111 million. That spending has bested the record set in 2016 by the pharmaceutical industry, which spent $109 million to kill a California ballot measure aimed at capping drug prices. (Michael Hiltzik, 10/29)
Los Angeles Times:
Anti-Vaccine Stupidity Returns, As Measles Cases Rise And California Parents Evade The Law
California struck a blow for intelligent public health policy in 2015, when the state abolished all “personal belief exemptions” from child vaccine mandates. The new rules were designed to put a stop to the stupid and irresponsible behavior of parents whose casual approach to getting their children vaccinated against a host of communicable diseases — chiefly measles, mumps and rubella — places their neighbors’ children and their entire communities at risk. (Michael Hiltzik, 10/30)
Los Angeles Times:
Gun Suicides Far Outpace Gun Homicides. Here's Why That Statistic Matters
About two-thirds of gun deaths in the U.S. each year are suicides, traumatic and desperate acts that often lie at the nexus of mental illness and ready access to a firearm. Yet a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that only 13% of people know that gun suicides far outpace homicides, a likely function of regular news coverage of violent crimes and a tendency to not cover suicides. (Scott Martelle, 11/1)
San Francisco Chronicle:
A California Prison Whistle Blower Exposes The State’s Weakness On Mental Health Care
The top psychiatrist in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has accused his prison bosses of misleading the federal court — and opposing lawyers — in a long-running inmate lawsuit about appropriate levels of psychiatric treatment. The judge is weighing whether she should make the psychiatrist’s whistle-blower report public. Meanwhile, the stakes for this surprising court fight include inmate health and safety, taxpayer dollars, and the public’s trust in prison reforms that are already years in the making. (10/26)