Uber’s Ballot Initiative: A History of Rewriting the Rules

It’s called the “Protecting Automobile Accident Victims from Attorney Self-Dealing Act.” The pitch is straightforward: cap what lawyers can take from car accident settlements (from 33% to 35% of the total settlement) so injured Californians keep more of their money.

As a Californian, you might look at that and think, great, it’s about time somebody did something about those billboard lawyers. Fair.

But understanding who funds a ballot initiative, and what they stand to gain, is relevant context before signing anything. Here’s what that picture looks like.

Uber. A company that has spent $32.5 million on this ballot measure alone, and hundreds of millions more over the past decade lobbying to reshape laws across several states and countries. Some of those efforts were so questionable that they triggered a global investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists based on 124,000 leaked internal documents. Others were blocked by state supreme courts for being misleading and confusing.

This isn’t a consumer advocacy group pushing for reform. This is a $14-billion-a-year corporation asking California voters to permanently alter the state Constitution in ways that would limit what injured people can recover, make it harder for them to find legal representation, and cap what doctors can be reimbursed for treating them.

And it would apply to every car accident in California. Not just crashes involving Uber vehicles. Every fender bender, every highway collision, every hit-and-run. All of them.

Before you sign a petition or cast a vote, the history matters. Because Uber has done this before.

Entering Markets, Breaking Rules, Spending Whatever It Takes

Uber didn’t grow into a global company by playing within the system. It grew by ignoring the system and then spending enormous sums to change it after the fact.

The ICIJ’s 2022 investigation, based on documents leaked by former chief European lobbyist Mark MacGann, revealed that the company routinely launched in cities before obtaining regulatory approval, then used its consumer base as leverage to pressure governments into legalizing its operations. 

One internal document showed a proposed global lobbying and public relations budget of $90 million for a single year. 

In an internal message, the company’s head of global communications put it bluntly: in several countries, “We’re just f—ing illegal.”

When regulatory authorities raided Uber offices in at least six countries, executives directed staff to remotely cut access to company servers to prevent police from seizing evidence. Internally, this was known as the “kill switch.”

Uber later acknowledged “mistakes and missteps” under its previous leadership and said the company had been transformed under its current CEO. That may well be true. But the strategy of spending massive amounts to rewrite the rules hasn’t gone anywhere. The targets have simply shifted.

The Taxi Drivers Who Paid the Price

Before Uber turned its attention to lawyers and medical providers, it reshaped another industry. The taxi business didn’t just lose market share. It collapsed.

Uber flooded regulated markets with subsidized rides that undercut licensed drivers who carried commercial insurance, paid for medallions, and complied with safety requirements they had no choice about.

In San Francisco, Yellow Cab filed for bankruptcy in 2016. The city had sold roughly 500 medallions at $250,000 each. The entire company sold for approximately $810,000, barely the price of three medallions. In New York City, medallion values crashed from over $1 million to under $200,000 within a few years. Hundreds of owners, many of them immigrant families who had treated medallions as retirement investments, went bankrupt.

The economic disruption was severe enough that financial distress among medallion owners became a documented public health concern – with multiple suicides among New York taxi drivers cited in connection with the collapse.

The pattern is worth naming plainly: enter a regulated market, ignore the regulations, spend billions to build dominance, then spend millions more to change the rules after the damage is done.

Prop 22: The $200 Million Template

If the current ballot initiative feels familiar, it should. Uber has done this in California before.

When the state passed Assembly Bill 5 in 2019, requiring companies like Uber to classify gig workers as employees, Uber and other gig companies responded with Proposition 22. The combined campaign spending exceeded $200 million, making it the most expensive ballot measure in California history. The campaign framed the measure as protecting “driver flexibility.”

What it actually did was exempt app-based drivers from employee protections like health insurance, workers’ compensation, and paid sick leave. And it was structured to require a seven-eighths legislative supermajority to amend, making it virtually impossible to change once passed.

Supporters of Prop 22, including many drivers, argued that the flexibility of independent contractor status was preferable to traditional employment. The debate over how best to protect gig workers remains ongoing.

One of the central promises was that keeping drivers as independent contractors would keep fares affordable. According to Gridwise data reported by CalMatters, average California Uber fares rose from $14.11 in 2019 to $27.15 by 2025. The promise didn’t hold. The law did.

Quietly Cutting Insurance Protections

While the ballot initiative has drawn headlines, a less visible change already took effect at the start of this year.

In October 2025, Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 371, which reduced the insurance that ride-hailing companies must carry for crashes involving uninsured and underinsured motorists. The previous requirement was $1 million per person. The new requirement is $60,000 per person and $300,000 per incident.

That is a 94% reduction in per-person coverage, for the exact scenario where injured passengers need protection most: when the driver who hit them has little or no insurance. The stated purpose was to lower ride fares. Fares have continued to rise.

Nevada Said No

California isn’t Uber’s first attempt at this kind of initiative. In January 2025, the company backed a ballot measure in Nevada that would have capped attorney contingency fees at 20% in civil cases, which would have been the strictest cap in the nation.

The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously blocked it, finding that the description of the measure’s effects was “misleading and confusing.” Uber had spent $5 million on the effort, and more than 200,000 Nevadans had already signed.

After the court rejection, the company struck a deal through the Nevada legislature to reduce its liability exposure through a separate bill. It lowered the required insurance minimum from $1.5 million to $1 million, and both sides agreed to a six-year truce.

The California initiative’s 25% fee cap is less aggressive than Nevada’s proposed 20%. But the measure goes further in ways that have received far less attention.

What the Fine Print Actually Does

Beyond the fee cap, the initiative limits what accident victims can recover for medical expenses. 

Unpaid bills would be capped at 125% of the Medicare reimbursement rate. 

The cap is based on what Medicare would have paid for your treatment, not what the hospital actually charged. So if your emergency care costs $80,000 but Medicare would only reimburse $15,000, you multiply that Medicare rate by 1.25 (125%). Therefore, the most you could recover is $18,750, regardless of your actual bill.

The measure also raises the legal standard for recovering those unpaid medical costs from the ordinary civil standard (“preponderance of evidence”) to “clear and convincing evidence,” a threshold typically reserved for cases involving fraud. That is a significant legal barrier that most people won’t understand until it’s applied to their case.

Because this is a constitutional amendment, the California legislature cannot modify or repeal it. Only another ballot measure can. That’s the same structural lock that made Prop 22 nearly untouchable.

The Part That Deserves an Honest Concession

The personal injury system is not above criticism. There are documented problems with billing practices, and the initiative’s prohibition on financial kickback arrangements between attorneys and medical providers addresses a legitimate concern. No one should defend schemes that inflate medical costs at the expense of injured people.

But targeted reform and a constitutional amendment that restructures medical recovery statewide are two very different things. As Stanford law professor Nora Engstrom wrote in the Sacramento Bee, capping contingency fees functions as a price control. And economists generally agree that price controls end up hurting the people they claim to protect.

20,000 Robotaxis and a Convenient Timeline

There’s one more piece of context that’s difficult to ignore.

In late 2025, Uber announced a partnership with Lucid Motors and Nuro to build its own fleet of driverless vehicles. Autonomous testing began on Bay Area public roads in December, with a commercial launch planned for later this year. The company has committed to deploying at least 20,000 autonomous vehicles over six years.

If the ballot initiative passes in November, the new rules limiting what accident victims can recover and how easily they can retain legal representation would take effect before that fleet is fully operational on California roads.

Uber’s executives have told investors on earnings calls that reducing insurance and legal costs is expected to improve margins and drive revenue growth. Whether those two timelines are connected is a question the company has not publicly addressed.

What California Stands to Lose

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has projected that if the measure passes, attorneys would likely decline to take on cases they otherwise would have pursued, reducing the number of filings. The state could face increased Medi-Cal costs ranging from millions to tens of millions of dollars annually, because accident victims who can’t recover compensation through the legal system will fall back on public programs. Insurance providers could face increased costs as well, which could contribute to higher health care premiums for everyone.

Medical providers have warned that the reimbursement caps could cause some doctors to stop treating accident patients on a lien, the arrangement that allows uninsured or underinsured victims to receive care upfront and pay from their settlement later. Without that option, some injured Californians may simply go without treatment.

The result: fewer attorneys willing to take cases, fewer doctors willing to treat patients, and higher costs shifted to taxpayers – all locked in by a constitutional amendment the legislature cannot touch.

The initiative is called the “Protecting Automobile Accident Victims from Attorney Self-Dealing Act“. Supporters and critics agree that inflated medical billing and attorney-provider arrangements are legitimate problems worth addressing.

Where they disagree is whether a constitutional amendment that limits medical recovery and caps attorney fees is the right solution – and who bears the cost. That’s the question California voters will answer in November.