From Palo Alto Online:
A proposal by a union of health care workers to impose caps on how much Palo Alto's medical providers can charge patients and insurance companies was emphatically rejected by local voters on Election Day on Tuesday.
The proposal, known as Measure F, would have placed City Hall in charge of regulating the health care costs of most local medical providers to ensure that none are charging their patients more than 115 percent of the cost of "direct patient care," which excludes administrative salaries. The Service Employees International Union-United Health Workers (SEIU-UHW) had argued that the measure is necessary to curb Stanford's exorbitant costs and ensure that Stanford devotes more resources to reducing its high rate of hospital-contracted diseases.
With 93 percent of the results counted, the measure was trailing by a huge margin, with 77.03 percent of the voters opposing it and 22.97 percent supporting it. Of all the votes cast, 10,702 went against Measure F while 3,192 went for it. ...
