Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’ (opens in new tab)

The NHS used to own its radiography suites. It used to own its land and buildings. It used to hire doctors and nurses and support staff directly.

But because of a [also recent] forced-tender system, and high breakthrough prices on in-housing projects, it was deemed "cheaper" to let private providers burden the upfront costs of equipment, land and building management, and short contract management.

Shock, horror! Letting "interface companies" extract profit makes services more expensive, and now we're paying more, it's even less affordable to talk about major public capital investment to bring these critical, primary services back in-house.

The NHS needs to stand up for itself and politicians need to start talking about 20y plans. Making ends meet today isn't enough. Giving up, adding insurance companies to the mix won't do anything but make it even more expensive.

There have been various contortions along the road; initially, the plan was that all GP surgeries would be required to upload patient data to the (shareable) national collection. The government partially backed down, allowing patients to opt out of that kind of sharing. A separate opt-out was required for data concerning hospital treatment. Both required patients to acquire and submit a paper form; there was no opt-out website.

Then they changed the structure of the sharing system a little, rendering prior opt-outs moot; you had to opt-out again.

You'd think the government would be able to make a lot of money out of this data; but one of the scandalous early deals they made was to sell the data of a million patients to the Society of Actuaries. For £3,000. Actuaries work for insurance companies; and insurance companies would dearly love to get their hands on people's health data. But £3,000?

Now Palantir's core business is collecting data. It isn't a medical company. Corellating "anonymised" data is what they do. They are hostile to privacy, and they are famously secretive.

There are people in government who want to privatize the NHS completely. Unfortunately for them, the NHS is probably the most popular institution in the UK; so they salami-slice. Various NHS services are privatized by stealth; the last CT scan I had was conducted in a van in the hospital carpark, run by some US health conglomerate. Various testing services have been fully privatized, with the original NHS services shut down.

So there are two threads behind this story: the creeping privatisation of NHS services, and the involvement of this creepy company in handling patient data.

Sweden walked this same path and is deeply deeply suffering the privatisation.

Doctors are nowhere to be seen, waiting times are absolutely impossible to work with. You basically have to beg to see a doctor and even then they will likely decline you unless you’re in pain.

It’s ridiculous. It can be directly attributed to the privatisation of the underlying services.

I believe the mechanism you're advocating for is generally referred to as a dictatorship.

The government clearly has a goal they want to achieve and cleaning up their data with AI seems like a solution more likely to work than throwing a small army of bureaucrats at it.

The right wingers when it comes to government control advocate for either 1. don't let government have much control (starve the beast) or 2. if govt already has control, let them at least do it efficiently without wasting taxpayers' money.

The left on the other hand want to empower governments with more and more control, but once the govt has it, they want to prevent it from doing it efficiently - by disallowing efficient use of data and technology - which catches them red handed as they pretty much just want to empower themselves through grants, inefficient paper shuffler bullshit job and other forms of transfers at the expense of others.

https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.1261...

Just look up the NHS and public private partnership.

The numbers were cooked from the beginning to make it look cheaper, see issues of private eye from around the y2k till about now.