The NHS is under massive stress, both financially and in terms of staffing. Making it cheaper and/or more efficient would absolutely be a good idea IF it could be done without making it drastically worse in other aspects. Stabilizing the NHS has been one of the longstanding campaign issues of the Labour party; significant setbacks in this regard would further erode public trust in them. And god knows they can't afford to screw up any further.
That being said, I don't see how using Palantir does all that much for this goal. Won't solve the big bulk of the shortage of physicians or nurses, and will only marginally reduce waste. Giving them access to all this sensible data seems like a too steep price if you ask me.
Side note: universal healthcare is not the same as the British single payer system. You can also have universal healthcare and multiple competing public health funds. That's the system used, for example, by France, Germany, the Netherlands and many more.
Just to add to this, as an example of the issues faced by the NHS, during the conservative rule they adopted a political scheme whereby many non-EU nurses working in the NHS on Tier 2 visas would have had to leave the UK after six years unless they earned at least £35,000 a year - a salary most nurses did not reach at the time. Critics described this as “kicking out” or “deporting” foreign nurses. its not a far stretch to say the conservative government was racist, or if not racist, carried out multiple shenanigans that a critic could argue, was racist.
stuff like this just made the NHS worse again.
This post was edited by ferdia on May 16 2026 10:29am