Voters Get Last Word

Countless words--heartfelt and hired, meant to enlighten and meant to obscure--have gusted around the 15 statewide propositions on Tuesday’s ballot.

Voters soon will have the final word, putting a quick stop to the winds by quietly pushing styluses. Before they do, some questions not often posed during the long issue campaigns bear asking:

Are the propositions more than pet concerns that interest groups and ideologues have succeeded in elevating to the status of ballot questions? Do they really touch on the lives and direct interests of voters, and if so, how?

To get some indication of the answers, The Times invited seven voters to talk at length about the ballot issues and their own lives. All seven, most of whom live in the San Fernando Valley, had participated in a recent Times Poll. What they said has been condensed but remains in their own words.

The ballot measures they focused on as particularly meaningful included Proposition 205, which would provide $700 million in bonds to build and renovate county jails and juvenile detention facilities; Proposition 206, which would authorize $400 million in bonds for home and farm loans to military veterans (the Cal-Vet program); Proposition 209, which would abolish affirmative action in state and local government employment and state university admissions; Proposition 210, which would raise the minimum wage in the state to $5.75 an hour by March 1998; Propositions 214 and 216, which would provide closer government regulation of health maintenance organizations; and Proposition 215, which would legalize marijuana for medical use via doctor’s prescription.

Despite poring over the state-provided voter information pamphlet, all of those interviewed admitted to at least some confusion about what the ballot issues are truly about and blame misleading pro and con advertising.

Many also voiced resentment of the initiative process itself for their being called upon to make judgments about matters they don’t always entirely understand.

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ROSS BOWEN, 48, an electrical engineer, has two daughters and lives in West Hills.

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The HMO initiatives, 214 and 216, they’re kind of important right now. I’m currently with an HMO, PacifiCare. My wife went to a gynecologist, the gynecologist sent her for a mammogram. They found something that looked serious. All of a sudden you hit the rail. The blood pressure goes up and you’re really worried. This was four months ago.

The gynecologist referred us to another specialist which was in this general umbrella group that we belong to. The specialist was down in Tarzana and everybody we’d talked to said he’s great.

There was one glitch when we actually went in for the first consultation with the specialist--apparently there wasn’t prior approval. You have to have prior approval through your primary-care physician. But it apparently hadn’t gone through there. At that time, the apprehension--we were on the rail. You didn’t want to wait two days. You didn’t want to wait a week. Get it taken care of. I don’t care, I want it checked right now.

We were fortunate in the fact that our neighbor two doors down works at our primary-care physician’s office. We called her, she says, “Let me take care of it,” and in 10 minutes she calls us back and says, “It’s been approved.”

Then it worked perfectly. The specialist went ahead and set up a biopsy at the Tarzana medical center. It was within a week and a half. Probably nine, 10 days. Pretty quick. And he had surgical time set up and we actually went in for the biopsy and it came out negative, thank God.

But that experience worked out real well. I didn’t see that little glitch as a snafu from belonging to an HMO. It was just an administrative thing. It could have happened in any office. Nowadays, there’s no carte blanche with insurances. Unless you’re writing a check to pay everybody, you’re gonna have to go through those hoops.

It didn’t cost us anything. If we’d been doing this through a private network, we’d have been paying every time, and then we’d submit a bill to Prudential or to whoever your insurance carrier is and say, “OK, this is for this or that.” And so, ultimately, it was less hassle.

So I feel comfortable that things are working and they’re going to get better. I feel the HMOs, at least the HMO that I belong to, are starting to respond. There’s a lot of competition out there. I think the free market is really going to drive the HMOs toward better care, more acceptable care. People are going to be happier with them. So just to add more bureaucracy into it, more government regulation and more control is not going to help. It’s just going to reflect in higher cost for the HMOs, so I’m going to vote no on those.