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I wonder if the biggest thing preventing healthcare reform is the hospital lobby working together with insurance companies. What they're doing really should be illegal.

I don't know that it's conspiratorial collusion as much as it is government has interfered with the system to set up all the wrong incentives. If you pay medical costs individually or buy insurance for yourself, you pay for it with after tax dollars. But getting insurance through your employer makes it like 15-50% off (including social security/medicare and depending on your tax bracket, or even more with state/local income taxes.) So even before Obamacare, the federal government strongly subsidized the model of expecting insurance to pay for everything, and now with Obamacare they've doubled-down on that model.

Of course hospitals and insurance companies love Obamacare! For the latter, it mandates that everyone buy their product, and that they buy more of it (since more things now must be covered.) For hospitals, it continues the model of zero cost accountability, charging whatever they want, and blaming those greedy insurance companies if any of the cost ends up coming out of your pocket.

It doesn't strike you as naive to think that if prisons are allowed to be profit centers that this might incentivize higher incarceration rates? It is coming at the taxpayer expense, of course.

All prisons ultimately are run by and the responsibility of the government, and all prisons involve the government paying people to run them, who then have incentives to keep the prisons full so they can keep earning money. The main difference with private prisons is that they're staffed by government contractors rather than government employees. Only 3.7% of U.S. prisoners are housed in private prisons, so it can't be the source of all our ills that reddit seems to think it is. There was indeed one hideous abuse of private prisons, and I'm glad to find out that the corrupt judges involved finally got 17-28 years in prison - still too little for the thousands of lives that they ruined.

Marylandman101's question was very specific and I think he's absolutely right - as a private prison industry member, CCA lobbies to try to get private prison contracts, just like Boeing and Lockheed lobby to get airplane contracts, software companies lobby to get the Obamacare website contract, and teachers lobby for more pay, smaller classrooms, lifetime tenure, etc. But look at who lined up against California's Proposition 19 a few years go to legalize marijuana:

• California Police Chiefs Association

• California State Sheriffs Association

• California Police Officers Association

• California District Attorneys Association

• California Chamber of Commerce

• both gubernatorial candidates, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman

• both candidates for state attorney general, Steve Cooley and Kamela Harris

• The alcohol lobby

• The prison guards union, 96+% of whom presumably work in government-run prisons

For perspective, here's a very anti-private-prisons article that says private prison industry lobbying amounted to $10.6 million over 10 years, and much of that was lobbying to get prison contracts - nothing to do with lobbying about drug prohibition or increasing sentences. Compare their $1 million/year across the U.S. to the $400,000 spent by California police unions alone, in a single state regarding a single issue, to oppose California's proposition 19.

tl;dr Governor Johnson and Marylandman101 are both right. CCA lobbies for more prison contracts, but public police, district attorneys, prison guard unions, and mainstream politicians of both parties are overwhelmingly the primary culprits lobbying to continue our current over-incarceration policies.

End the war on people who use drugs and we'll free half the prisoners.

Repeal mandatory minimum sentences and we'll cut it in half again.

But yes, instead of then cutting jail funding by 75%, we could just cut it by 70% and use that extra 5% to do a better job of rehabilitating the criminals that are left in jail.

By supporting this Wyden-Daines amendment, you appear to be endorsing reauthorization of the terrible, awful USA FREEDOM Act, which is the 2015 changed name for the freedom-limiting Patriot Act. The USA FREEDOM Act will expire if Congress does nothing, which Congress is typically very good at. Why not come out strongly against reauthorization, instead of supporting reauthorization with amendments?

I just Googled and found that 5 years ago to their credit they did come out strongly against the entire USA FREEDOM Act. This time around their press releases seem more focused on amending it.