The 2025 buy back by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections of its Lawton facility for 312 million dollars should be a cautionary tale for Oklahoma lawmakers.
There are times when a solid and transparent partnership with private companies makes sense. Those would most likely include non-essential or competitive commercial services where competition serves to keep quality high and prices low.
The real world test is if that partnership provides a less complicated and higher quality service for Oklahomans.
But there is a problem in Oklahoma when privatizing entire departments and services is becoming the default setting for our lawmakers. With essential services, privatization often leads to higher fees, a more complicated system and, sometimes, reduced service for the user.
Private companies are in the business of making money for their owners or investors, as they should be.
Because of that, private companies are generally not suited for government services. Essential government services have a different purpose. We got an example of that with our privatized prison system failure.
We also get reminded of what privatization feels like each time we deal with healthcare insurance and managed Medicare and Medicaid. (These challenges are also felt daily by rural healthcare providers.) It is true that Medicare and Medicaid are federal programs but private insurance companies enter into negotiated contracts with the state of Oklahoma to manage these services.
The rush to broadly privatize services is making life for rural Oklahomans more complicated and more expensive. It is leaving the lives and livelihoods of many long time state employees in constant uncertainty. And, it is affecting the quality of services to Oklahomans, which is the main point of a government service.
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