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Comment by RealCodingOtaku | Hacker News Reader

The contract with NHS is about 300 mil, public don't want it, most GPs don't want it, so let's drop that next.

Developing a replacement system is still going to cost a hell of a lot. It's not like if you dropped palatir then we'd suddenly have a free drop-in replacement and everyone can have their fiver back

You pay money to Palantir that money essentially escapes the economy, you develop a sovereign solution yes you pay millions even more but that goes into corporations and people actually living in the country, paying taxes and spending their coins here.

It doesn't escape the economy. This is the kind of bizarre left-wing isolationism/nationalism that seems to be rife amongst people who don't understand free markets.

If you pay money to Palantir, they are providing a service in return. That service is investment in your own economy, you pay them and then you own the thing they produce. Money does not "escape", the same amount of money is there before and after. The reason the UK is doing bad is this kind of bizarre economic xenophobia combined with a complete hostility to any kind of innovation or change. The question is: why don't we have a company competing with Palantir? Should be very obvious.

Sure, but you can receive the service and also keep the money spent within the country.

I'm not sure you are arguing against the point that the above poster is making. They aren't saying "giving money to foreign companies is bad". It's "in order to have a healthy domestic service economy, we should be investing it it wherever possible" combined with "investment in on-shore development is largely recaptured in income tax" (thus it can be worthwhile for the public even when slightly more expensive).

A free market is not a means to an end. Part of the reason that the USA was (until recently) doing so well was that the winner-takes-all mentality of the free-market benefits Silicon Valley, but that doesn't mean that other nation states have to submit to that philosophy.

Yes, a replacement will cost money. But probably less than a year contract with Palantir.

Mistakes were made (I would argue intentionally because of local wallet minima with stakeholders), there is a sunk cost to using Palantir. The country can't even develop it further, because it's Palantir's. That's not an argument to keep using it.

The country needs to develop the ability, to develop critical national infrastructure (this includes software, obviously is not limited to it). I would also argue it already has the ability, we need to prevent it from withering away.

Palantir will do the same as local companies (building on top of open source) except it needs to make a large tech profit and with its monopolistic ability, It will capture the value for itself.

Procurement has a misaligned efficiency incentive. Procurement and governments want a single provider so it's less direct cost on them on managing projects. Sadly, they've actually unnaturally forced a monopoly, resulting in serious costs and inefficiencies in the long term. We need a way to encourage multiple providers for the same thing, and allow new companies to join in even when they're late. Just like B2B and B2C.

I wonder if anyone has some thoughts in this area

I would rather not hand mine or my neighbours' health data to a spy-tech firm, who will have unlimited access to their data[0].

Not having the system (it's not like it's already in use anyway) is always a good step in the right direction. And a replacement built-in UK will provide more jobs, more tax money, and digital sovereignty for UK.

https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/05/palantir-to-be-granted...

I don't know the specifics of that deal, but hospitals operated very well for hundreds of years without computers. I've often heard friends who work in hospitals complain about the software. It may be worth considering if there needs to be an IT solution at all, and if so, if simple scanning/archiving software would better fit the bill than any proposed "solution" that misses the mark.

When they first rolled out Universal Credit, they decided to do it using Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

It didn't work very well, so GDS rebuilt it in-house.

My NHS region has rejected using Palantir as they claim that their own internal systems are better, those could be considered for the rest of the NHS.

Have you considered just not building this kind of thing at all?

The NHS does have a problem that it is built as a collection of individual trusts all using their own IT systems and after decades has an issue with transferring data between trusts.

So that's why an interconnected system is required in order to share data between the trusts while maintaining compatibility with their existing processes

This just sounds like 'We have too many systems, so lets build another one to solve the problem!"

https://xkcd.com/927/

No it doesn't, people are against it due to their ties, not because they don't like the service.

The solution here is quite obviously unifying the NHS IT under a single system, not cobble together another one to interface between all the old incompatible ones.

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