I felt this was about Uber being told they had to treat drivers like employees in California too, and look how that turned out: A dystopian rule that lawmakers can't overturn to enable worker exploitation.
Generally, we should be moving away from linking health insurance and other benefits to employment.
Having insurance tied to employment is bad for workers. It makes switching jobs far more difficult and stressful, and makes losing your job that much more of an issue.
The insurance market model for healthcare coverage is such a fractally broken failure that if you're still stuck on the stage of twisting some knobs and adjusting some levers in the hope that second-order market effects will improve things then there really is just nothing that will convince you to move on.
Healthcare is an area where market forces are inherently perverted because people often don't have a choice of not buying the service. This is why every sensible country uses a socialized system instead. Not only does it provide better service, but without the perverse market incentives and multiple layers of middlemen infesting the system it is much less expensive.
Only the surgeon's pricing was available ahead of time. The hospital provided an invoice at the time of surgery, marked as "SUBJECT TO CHANGE". The anesthesiologist himself didn't know how much his services would cost.
Three weeks later, we're still watching invoices and insurance claims roll in.
Medical tourism is a direct testament to inflated charges as a systematic problem. Finding a hospital with non-inflated costs requires crossing international borders.
I'd rather have a fully private market without national entities messing with the prices and charities for those who can't afford it.
Of course, no politician will ever champion such a system, because it removes the gov from the equation, making them less powerful and needed by the masses that keep paying taxes.
What other sort of W4 job lets you chose both how many and which hours you want to work, and let you skip any assignments you don't want to complete? That honestly is so totally backwards to even how part time jobs work that I'm not convinced it would be viable.
While differences in spending surely have some effect, spending isn't the only way to get the word out. I didn't measure, but I feel pretty confident that no more than 60% of the total communication about Prop 22 that I heard from any source was pro. I think it could have been a minority actually. For every PR firm the pro side hired, there were thousands of unpaid activists on the con side (which does say something positive about the con side!).
I noticed you brought out the "lawmakers can't repeal" line. This is true, but also effectively standard for ballot measures in CA. In fact the default is that you can't repeal or change the law under any circumstances. This was one point that initially swayed me to vote "against", but once I learned that this was basically how all ballot measures work (including ones you support, I'm sure), I swung back to voting "for".
For me, this was a difficult call, but I voted "for" on the basis of the net good for the entire pool of current drivers, admittedly at the expense of the smaller number of drivers who would have been able to drive under a better deal had this passed.
The net effect this would have had on driver welfare is far from obvious, so it always bugs me when people assert that the only reason this passed by a 17 point margin is that people were tricked and confused by the ride sharing companies.
You’ll note the issue of slavery wasn’t put to a public vote to outlaw it. It was still of a struggle to outlaw as it was.
All that most people, unfortunately, care about, is that they can open an app that solves a problem for them, and it's solved. They don't care about the people who are hurt in the process.
And then, yeah, incredible spending on Uber's part is going to slide the scale a bit too.
Look, if you put a vote out to say that Amazon workers are now indentured servants of Jeff Bezos and have to work for free and can never leave, but their Amazon purchases will all be 15% cheaper... the vote would pass, because the majority of people don't work at Amazon.
I personally know several people who voted for the proposition under the impression that it was a pro-worker proposition that would guarantee benefits for drivers. There were 3 other people for whom I explained the context around it (including the fact that it was preempting a flawed bill from the legislature) before they mailed their ballots in and they changed their vote.
I also know several people who think that we should eliminate the rules for treating workers as employees in general, and they voted for the bill as well, so there's definitely some support. Its definitely clear from my point of view that a significant fraction of the people who voted for the proposition did so because they misunderstood what they were voting for.
OTOH that's probably true about all ballot measures ever, and probably most legislation as well.
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