Palantir Enters a Socialised System

Wherever you live, you'll have certain behaviours and mindsets that are so ingrained as to blind you to any alternatives. Northern Europe's aversion to air-conditioning is a great example, as is North America's love affair with long car journeys over air travel. And, yes, I know both air-con and flights are big polluters, but that's only because of how they're fuelled. If we'd all dropped our ingrained petroleum mindsets decades ago, we might have environmentally friendly options by now. Anyway, that's not the point.

This article concerns a set of behaviours and views that are almost unique to Britain, but are likely to spread as inequality forces more state subsidisation of global healthcare. We Brits have deluded ourselves into thinking that socialised healthcare is the only option, even though it isn't and even though it has failings that are trivial to plug, at least on an individual level.

For example, I was recently told about a young Greek who had gone to her doctor in London, requested a health check - blood work, urine, heart rate, etc. - and been told to get lost. She asked her British colleagues why she wasn't seen, and they got a bit hostile about why Britain's tax-funded healthcare system doesn't waste money on young people with no symptoms.

That is true, but it doesn't mean you can't get a health check - you just have to pay for it privately (and it's not that expensive). It is not at all surprising to me that none of the young Greek's colleagues realised this. It would never even occur to most Brits that paying for a voluntary health check is a thing they can do.

Britain's National Health Service is a truly wonderful institution - it is there to serve everyone, for free, at the point of greatest need - but it was never meant to be (and isn't!) the only form of healthcare in Britain. An entire economy of other providers can be used to supplement what the NHS offers. Some of these are familiar - opticians and dentists, for instance, are often private - but you can also see private physiotherapists, osteopaths, nutritionists, psychologists, and, if you really want a health check, you can pay private doctors. Too few people do.

So strong is the British mindset that healthcare is socialised that even private suppliers to the NHS are looked upon with disdain. Big tech companies, for instance, are the Devil incarnate. And that has brought Britain's NHS-loving public face-to-face with Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley's most vociferously capitalist figures.

Thiel's centrepiece company, Palantir, has been commissioned by the NHS to build the Federated Data Platform. This has become bafflingly controversial because what the FDP promises - the ability to draw data from the NHS's many disparate computer systems and finally make use of it all - is an obviously good thing that everybody wants. The problem is that Thiel's political persuasions and previous comments - and he did liken the NHS to Stockholm Syndrome - have raised questions about his suitability as an NHS partner.

I've thought a lot about this. I’ve spent almost my entire data science career working with NHS data - my day job is healthcare analytics - and the FDP is the biggest thing to happen in my world since the GDPR. I've flip-flopped and contradicted myself and landed, I think, on the following conclusion: so what if hyper-capitalist Peter Thiel is antithetical to a socialised healthcare system?

We need something like the FDP and Palantir is offering to provide it. Just like Microsoft provides the NHS with productivity suites, umpteen over-charging pharmaceutical companies supply it with medications, and the total fossil fuel burn of several small countries keeps the lights on and the ambulances running. Sometimes, you have to accept a bit of roughness on the path to the greater good.

And sometimes - often, actually - it's worth paying for a private health check.

Thanks for reading. If you know anyone who might like this article, please share it with them. Ben J. Clarke - benjclarke.me

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