Peter Thiel claims that the British public supports their National Health System because they suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome. The claim is amusing, thought-provoking, and may be partly true. But I suspect that there are other reasons for the British public’s support. I suspect they assume that future advances in health care inevitably will be more expensive than they will be able to afford. They do not understand that in a laissez-faire health system substantial incentives would exist to develop effective low-cost cures and therapies.
(p. 8) It began with a £1 contract.
In the hours after a pandemic was declared in March 2020, Palantir, the secretive American data analytics company, was invited to 10 Downing Street along with other tech groups, including Amazon, Google and Meta, to discuss how it could help the British government respond.
Within days, Palantir’s software was processing streams of data from across England’s National Health Service, with Palantir engineers embedded to help. The company’s services, used by the C.I.A. and Western militaries for more than a decade, were deployed to track emergency room capacity and direct supplies of scarce equipment.
Palantir charged the government just one pound.
The deal provided the company with a valuable toehold. Since then, Palantir, which is chaired by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and one of President Donald J. Trump’s major 2016 donors, has parlayed the work into more than £60 million in government health contracts. Its biggest reward may be yet to come: a seven-year contract worth up to £480 million — about $590 million — to overhaul N.H.S. England’s outdated patient data system.
. . .
Palantir declined to comment on its bid but said it was proud to support “the world’s most important private and public institutions.” The company defended the quality of its work and said, “We are now helping to reduce the N.H.S. backlog, cut the amount of time nurses and doctors need to spend on administrative tasks and speed up cancer diagnosis — all while rigorously protecting data privacy.”
. . .
Speaking at Oxford University in January [2023], Mr. Thiel went off script. The N.H.S. makes people sick and should embrace privatization, he said in response to a question. The British public’s support for the service, he said, was “Stockholm syndrome.”
For the full story, see:
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 29, 2023, and has the title “How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Pushed Toward the Heart of U.K. Health Care.”)