How Palantir Will Steal the NHS | Hacker News Reader

How Palantir Will Steal the NHS

doctorow.medium.com

64 pointskubami26 comments

They can have it. It's broken anyway. Even the basics don't work anymore. My father can't get an injury looked at. After weeks he got a doctor's appointment, doctor says he needs tests at the local hospital. Local hospital doesn't pick up the phone and only has a webpage for booking appointments, said page simply says there are no appointments available. As in, permanently. Not like, no slots in the next few weeks. As in, the site won't let you book appointments at all.

The injury doesn't seem to be healing and I'm getting worried. It's not an emergency but the sort of thing that maybe can fester and get worse. They're starting to talk about going private but it seems everyone talks about that now so I'm not sure it's so easy.

> They can have it. It's broken anyway.

"That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."

The NHS hasn't been defunded. Check my other comment on this thread - NHS funding has never been cut and has risen far faster than the population size has. The collapse here wasn't a slow event anyway, it has very clearly been triggered by lockdowns/vaccines. The near closure of the health service in a failed attempt to slow the spread of an airborne virus created a backlog, forcing vaccines on the care home industry caused a lot of people to quit exacerbating an already existing bed blocker crisis, and now the ambulance services are being overwhelmed by a sudden and (officially) "unexplained" rise in callouts for heart attacks, strokes etc. What could possibly cause that I have no idea.

And the NHS isn't being privatized anyway so no clue what you're even talking about. Privatizing it might start to fix it. Good luck getting contracts that pay you by size of your patient list and not how much work you actually do, in a properly privatized system!

You need to track not just population but the amount of people who need the service. If population becomes older (which is generally the norm in a developed country) or otherwise less healthy (which may well be the case considering environment and food pollution) then even keeping the same number of people still requires the budget to be increased appropriately in order to be able to cover a given user equally well.

> The collapse here wasn't a slow event anyway, it has very clearly been triggered by lockdowns/vaccines

Absolutely fucking mental mate.

Yeah, totally mental. Me and the rest of the country, mate. The part you quoted is by far the least controversial aspect of anything I've said. In 2019 these problems weren't happening to anywhere near the same extent. Once lockdowns hit getting appointments has become drastically harder and this is widely reported.

It is cheaper to fly to India and get it seen by a specialist and have it treated or have a surgery done on the same day as you land. if you pay slightly extra, it will include 3 course meals as well.

The main problem is the lack of doctors, sure we import plenty of them. I wont even get into how we basically import almost what seems like slave labour. also no one wants to spend 15-20 years of their life for little returns, the easy answer is to increase the number of medical colleges, reduce the number of years to train by creating more specialisations.

apart from a few delicate surgeries, majority of the procedures are learnt with a year or two of training post your foundation level medical school, lot of specialisations can be automated away, Radiologists are probably the first to disappear.

Where in the country do you live? I've had some rough experiences down south but that sounds next level.

Father is in the North West.

I don’t think NHS funding has ever been “cut” in the history of the service. Sure, budget has been reduced from what was promised or intended, but every year the total spent has either increased or very occasionally been static [1].

Oh, and anyone who has actually had to use the NHS, or perhaps had a relative use it, particularly at the end of their lives, will have been very quickly disavowed of the idea that it is “world class”. This is not to say a US model is desirable (the US has the worst combination of various constituent practices/rules/structures) but other models are possible. The Dutch for one.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110

If there is an increasing number of people (including older people) with immigration, healthy birth rates and extending lifespan, not increasing the budget at corresponding speed (let alone keeping it static) is in all ways that matter effectively cutting it.

A common claim but utterly wrong. Population grew by 6.3% since 2011 years:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

NHS budget grew in the same period 53%

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...

Even if you ignore the massive injection for COVID it grew 39%. The NHS has far more money per pop than ever before in its history yet it cannot meet even the most basic expectations that a third world country would have, like people actually being seen by a doctor in a timely manner if they collapse on the street and an ambulance is called out. Let alone less urgent stuff.

That's why the idea Palantir or any company would ever want to "steal the NHS" is delusional. The NHS is a bottomless bonfire of money, it's the USSR in healthcare form and works just as well. The more money it gets the more dysfunctional and broken it becomes. Nobody in their right mind would want to steal such a worthless thing.

What part of my statement is wrong?

You claimed the budget didn't keep pace with population growth but it more than did. Even an aging population doesn't change needs by such a large amount.

I actually made no claim about NHS in particular. I only pointed out that if the number of people (and heavy service users in particular, like old people) is increasing then not increasing the budget appropriately is the same as cutting it.

I don't know if it kept up or not, but the comment I replied to mentioned that in some years the budget was static so unless UK population somehow stopped growing or becoming older the effective budget per user has been effectively cut in those years.

But to your point, you may say population increased by 6% but you ignore the fact that thanks to life standards having increased there's also an ever-increasing number of old people who don't count as population increase but do increase the burden on the NHS.

A balanced budget doesn't matter?

When the number of users you are serving goes up and the services each user uses increases due to age, then a balanced budget is in fact a cut in per user and especially per user service terms.

No, it does not.

I don’t get it.. how can a mere software company be part of an elaborate and insidious plot to rob the UK public? They sell software, do not get access to the data! What’s different from any other company?

The article nicely explains this. They can buy up all competitors at inflated prices, which means they can hold the NHS hostage with its own data.

So can other companies! Once they spent all that money, what prevents other competitors from taking that business from them?

They can simply not sell them. Palantir "buying" a company in this context means they either buy the owner out or buy controlling shares, in both cases nothing happens from there that they don't want to happen.

It will be sad if Adani privatized Australia and Palantir privatized UK.

Scary stuff but unfortunately true.

Thiel is really smart. He always talk about the right to online privacy [1] and especially his own, because his gay, living in NZ, etc. But his actions and the actions of his companies tells a totally different story. Explanation: When it comes to money vs. privacy, money always wins.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/opinion/peter-thiel-the-o...

I don't know if he actually lives in NZ? I know he bought a high country farm and allegedly imported a premade bunker- rich Americans went through a phase of considering us a lifeboat.

Oh, and his company was denied consent to build your usual "rich guy house with a view".

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/billionaire-peter-thiels-plans...

Which part of the Gawker was about money?

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