https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.1261...

The government clearly has a goal they want to achieve and cleaning up their data with AI seems like a solution more likely to work than throwing a small army of bureaucrats at it.

The right wingers when it comes to government control advocate for either 1. don't let government have much control (starve the beast) or 2. if govt already has control, let them at least do it efficiently without wasting taxpayers' money.

The left on the other hand want to empower governments with more and more control, but once the govt has it, they want to prevent it from doing it efficiently - by disallowing efficient use of data and technology - which catches them red handed as they pretty much just want to empower themselves through grants, inefficient paper shuffler bullshit job and other forms of transfers at the expense of others.

Just look up the NHS and public private partnership.

The numbers were cooked from the beginning to make it look cheaper, see issues of private eye from around the y2k till about now.

The NHS used to own its radiography suites. It used to own its land and buildings. It used to hire doctors and nurses and support staff directly.

But because of a [also recent] forced-tender system, and high breakthrough prices on in-housing projects, it was deemed "cheaper" to let private providers burden the upfront costs of equipment, land and building management, and short contract management.

Shock, horror! Letting "interface companies" extract profit makes services more expensive, and now we're paying more, it's even less affordable to talk about major public capital investment to bring these critical, primary services back in-house.

The NHS needs to stand up for itself and politicians need to start talking about 20y plans. Making ends meet today isn't enough. Giving up, adding insurance companies to the mix won't do anything but make it even more expensive.

There have been various contortions along the road; initially, the plan was that all GP surgeries would be required to upload patient data to the (shareable) national collection. The government partially backed down, allowing patients to opt out of that kind of sharing. A separate opt-out was required for data concerning hospital treatment. Both required patients to acquire and submit a paper form; there was no opt-out website.

Then they changed the structure of the sharing system a little, rendering prior opt-outs moot; you had to opt-out again.

You'd think the government would be able to make a lot of money out of this data; but one of the scandalous early deals they made was to sell the data of a million patients to the Society of Actuaries. For £3,000. Actuaries work for insurance companies; and insurance companies would dearly love to get their hands on people's health data. But £3,000?

Now Palantir's core business is collecting data. It isn't a medical company. Corellating "anonymised" data is what they do. They are hostile to privacy, and they are famously secretive.

There are people in government who want to privatize the NHS completely. Unfortunately for them, the NHS is probably the most popular institution in the UK; so they salami-slice. Various NHS services are privatized by stealth; the last CT scan I had was conducted in a van in the hospital carpark, run by some US health conglomerate. Various testing services have been fully privatized, with the original NHS services shut down.

So there are two threads behind this story: the creeping privatisation of NHS services, and the involvement of this creepy company in handling patient data.

Sweden walked this same path and is deeply deeply suffering the privatisation.

Doctors are nowhere to be seen, waiting times are absolutely impossible to work with. You basically have to beg to see a doctor and even then they will likely decline you unless you’re in pain.

It’s ridiculous. It can be directly attributed to the privatisation of the underlying services.

I believe the mechanism you're advocating for is generally referred to as a dictatorship.

Then Starmer can glide in, and do things that the Tories could never get away with doing, like privatizing healthcare.

> The added bonus is that if Labour gets a PR-like voting system implemented, it might be harder for any one (or two) parties to dominate politics and we could focus on goal-orientated politics. Maybe.

I doubt the PLP will ever show any serious effort to get this done. There's nothing they hate more than voting, and if there's any consistent policy from Labour it's that voting is an unfair commentary on things that average people are neither qualified nor deserving to discuss. They spend a significant amount of time as individuals trying to find people to remove the vote from.

Year 1 is so high in the in-house models because that's what's paying for the machine.

They'll make some noise about fixing it initially, but then it's back to the defund-privatise treadmill.

Publicly Funded Infrastructure is a thing for Big projects, but what usually happens is the people asking for the money are so local and desperate that those with the money call the shots. A recently built nearby hospital has it in their PFI contract that they have to repaint the whole hospital with a specific provider every year for 30 years at whatever number they come up with. I'm not sure if the NHS trust even ends up with the buildings. Many school-improvement projects go through PFI and end up with public land being transferred to private interest. "Give us your old buildings and land, and £50m and we'll build you a new shiny one that's further away that you can rent from us forever." It's the budgetary simplicity that sells these awful deals.

Where it's important to draw the distinction between the NHS and the Bobby Bonilla deal is the UK government can generate money for public capital infrastructure through public debt and taxation. When they need money for war, state funerals, or propping up banks, they just do it and we burden the cost. They could say "We need a dozen MRIs in the next few years", raise some tax revenue, make a bulk deal, and actually make the saving the NHS was designed to make. They could in-house road building, centralise a prefabricated school building factory, employ local government services directly.

But public debt is bad and saving up is apparently somehow worse, and in any way competing with private companies [with deep ties to Ministers] is strictly verboten so we're left bouncing between external private providers and PFI.

Even before the corruption, I do understand the scale of the problem insofar as anyone can understand volumes of money that end in "tn". But shying away from it, cowering behind awful deals while losing public assets isn't a solution either.

Why? Sorry but that’s horse shit.

There is nothing preventing socialised medicine for working. It costs less per capita nowadays than it did when it was put in place and productivity skyrocketed since.

The economic arguments were always the very privileged hiding their greed and contempt for the rest of us behind a fine veneer. I truly believe some of them even came to believe it to help themselves sleep at night. It doesn’t mean we all have to drink it.

Ultimately the government needs to be in charge of healthcare because healthcare is not a simple service but a human right. In many ways, we might trade the benefits of competition (which in the long run do end up ruining the system, just look at the USA) for the benefits of democratic ownership.

In any case, as others have pointed out, the system can be turned inefficient if government by government you dismantle the system a little bit and that's precisely what's been happening in the UK. However, this is not something that has happened in other countries in Europe and in general socialised healthcare gives us the highest life expectancy numbers.

A peculiarly American dogma. The irony of trotting it out on the field of healthcare is lost on you, I suppose, but gave me a laugh. Thanks.