Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#51

Post by oliwarner » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

boomskats wrote: post #34

oliwarner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's relatively new. 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 mana…

Sadly, selling it off to private US social care firms will be deemed the only solution to our recently imposed budget deficit.

Maybe, I don't think it'll happen quickly though.

Nobody wants US healthcare, not even the US; to willingly introduce it here would be instant political suicide. That gives me hope.

And Conservatives have screwed things so hard in the past 12 years, I think there's genuine appetite for public investment. The current Labour party isn't the government it very nearly could have been in 2017 but if their recently energy policy[1] is anything to go by, they're not afraid of borrowing to invest in long term savings.

Energy is a great example. If we could become independent of oil and not just swap that for lithium/cobalt dependencies, that probably is worth the outlay. Healthcare falls into a similar bracket.

The added bonus is that if Labour gets a PR-like voting system implemented, it might be harder for any one (or two) parties to dominate politics and we could focus on goal-orientated politics. Maybe.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/27/labour-will...

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#52

Post by stuaxo » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:44 AM UTC

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #9

3746648 wrote: post #3

Bloomberg used to be better. This is basically a non-story. The 'secret plan' was to use the nefarious mechanism of... Buying access that was for sale. All the allusions to shadyhandedness are just there to justify the existence of a story about Palantir because the author knew a story about a controversial company would propagate better even if it was devoid of anything meaningful to say.

It is the subject: NHS, Peter Thiel, CIA, Silicon Valley, privatization...the media coverage on this sort of stuff in the UK is deranged. Palantir is just offering a "shiny dashboard", we should build your own...it is that easy, just knock up a Palantir competitor in a weekend (the NHS has decent tech units, but core NHS is like this...they hire £20k "devs", ask why they are getting hacked all the time, nothing works…

And the UK already has GDS, who in the main are very good at building digital services for government itself, they could join up more with.

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#53

Post by stuaxo » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:46 AM UTC

timellis-smith wrote: post #26

anonymousDan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. The NHS is supposed to be a public service, but to undermine public support for it the UK government have been slowly trying to hack off bits of it to give to the private sector and strategically underfunding it. If they could get away with it they would probably sell the NHS down the river to US healthtech in order to get a US trade deal. So people are rightly se…

Do you have any evidence for this or are you just sprouting tired old anti-government rhetoric. > Overall, there is no evidence of a significant increase in spending on private providers or widespread privatisation of services in recent years. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/articles/big-elect...

You really don't have to look very far it's really well known.

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.

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#54

Post by stuaxo » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:48 AM UTC

jonnybgood wrote: post #11

collegeburner wrote: post #8

oh no, strategic m&a to enter a new market, getting a customer base and acquihiring a team with local experience? that's evil! i have lots of issues with palantir's applications spying on law abiding citizens and expanding government power but, uhh, this aint it chief.

Note that Palantir doesn’t spy on anything. It’s a shiny dashboard placed on top of an organization’s database. That’s all it is. Palantir does not provide data. It is the customer’s data.

They are ethically dubious as it the man behind it, why on earth would you give them access to a countries worth of public health data.

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#55

Post by MattPalmer1086 » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:51 AM UTC

bidirectional wrote: post #24

anonymousDan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So **ing what if UK healthtech isn't up to silicon valley 'standards'. As if the US healthcare system is anything to be envious of.

Quoted post unavailable.

Where do you see fanaticism in that comment?

I read it as not wanting a US style system. Which pretty much nobody in the world does, including a lot of Americans! So not that controversial...

We generally like healthcare to be free at the point of use. There are many ways that can be funded.

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#56

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 10:52 AM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #42

drstewart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The US system isn't up to anyones stabdard except the rich and powerfull. On Palantir, all I've seen from them so far is one orbtwo levels shinier then what you can build in Excel, while costing more and providing less value.

[deleted]

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#57

Post by oliwarner » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 11:02 AM UTC

oliwarner wrote: post #30

kmlx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

publicly funded systems routinely use privately funded solutions. there’s nothing new or special here. that fact that people disagree means nothing and should be ignored as people disagree all the times about anything and everything.

No, that's relatively new. 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 mana…

If you're unaware of how tender breaks public services, here's an example.

Hospital needs a new MRI suite. To them, this would cost £2m for the machine, £400k for the room, and £500/h in running cost, £1.4m/year. The first 5 years costs are: £3.8m, £1.4m, £1.4m, £1.4m, £1.4m, ...

But which trust has £4m in their back pocket for y1 cost? Even if they did, it's a large project so has to go out to tender. A capital-investment-backed provider comes back with a flat cost of £2m/year. They might have the additional cost of land but many of these [currently, right now in many hospitals] operate in containers in the carpark. At £2m, they break-even after Y4 and produce £600k a year profit from Y5 for another 11 years. NHS loses £6.6m over 15 years.

And it's not that simple because their £2m bid will be interesting but there'll another for £1.5m at half-duty that will sell operational time to private providers, even direct-to-public (increasingly popular in the UK) at massive markups. They'll break even in Y3. Possibly even quicker if the hospital realises it needs full duty and pays triple-rate to book the machine out.

So the NHS picks a private provider. They make a 5 year saving, and take an 11 year beasting. And at the end of it, or even halfway through it when they discover they need even more capacity, they find out that their old suite is now a support ward. Or managers have moved in, or it's just fallen down. The cost to build a new suite isn't the £2.4m it would have been, it's £4m. To get so assuming we would now need two machines, it's an £8m y1 cost to bring this back in-house.

The long-term budgetary flexibility required to go back to running your own services is staggering and something that is very hard to sell to people not looking at TCO.

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#58

Post by nonrandomstring » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

stepbeek wrote: post #33

oliwarner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's relatively new. 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 mana…

Yes! The UK has viewed private sector efficiency as axiomatic throughout my life. The New Statesmen has a good article on the systemic impact of such decisions in the current issue: https://magazine.newstatesman.com/2022/09/28/dieter-helm-cap...

Culminating with us more or less selling-out GCHQ to Amazon. A lot of voices are starting to frame this as national security. Regardless of political alliances and so-called "special relations" this is no longer about mere business. The frame of acquisitions, mergers, and contracts no longer adequately captures the risks. It's about where power lies and who actually runs a nation. If Huawei can be deemed a first-class threat, then so can Palantir, and this sort of revelation only makes that clearer.

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#59

Post by ethanbond » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

fooker wrote: post #32

missedthecue wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does Palantir do? What do customers pay them for?

Dashboards. That’s it.

In the same way that pharma companies produce “powder. That’s it.” or in the way that oil companies produce “liquid. That’s it.” or in the way that Apple produces “rectangles. That’s it.”

Re: Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

#60

Post by denton-scratch » Sun, Oct 02, 2022, 11:45 AM UTC

kmlx wrote: post #19

anonymousDan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so disingenuous. The whole point is that in a publicly funded health system many people disagree with this access being available in the first place. The UK government tries to paint a picture whereby giving such access will allow a raft of plucky UK startups to revitalize the NHS, when in reality we are just handing over our data and taxpayer money to the likes of Palantir.

publicly funded systems routinely use privately funded solutions. there’s nothing new or special here. that fact that people disagree means nothing and should be ignored as people disagree all the times about anything and everything.

The NHS posesses the largest, most-complete collection of national medical and health data in the world. Certain senior managers have been trying to share that collection with private firms for years.

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.