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Comment by collegeburner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 sensitive to anything that appears to point to large private sector companies gaining an increased foothold in the NHS

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.

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.

Note that you are incredibly wrong https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.1261...

> that's evil!

Not a Brit, so not directly involved, but, yes, letting private enterprise sneaking their way in into a government-run health system is the beginning of pure evil.

It doesn't sound like they're sneaking their way in. It sounds like they are acquiring private enterprises that already deal with the NHS, therefore getting exposure to that market. The private enterprise relationship with the NHS already exists before Palantir acquired it.

The NHS isn't completely vertically integrated. They buy their gowns, needles, rubber gloves, thermometers, and bedsheets from for-profit companies too. Is that "pure evil"?

In a way, yes, especially the medical-related things.

how is publicly acquiring a company, then entering a competitive bid priced against competition, "sneaking in"? nobody's sneaking here.

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