By KIM BELLARD
The funniest (unintentionally) story I read this week was by Tim Higgins. Wall Street Journal article Alex Karp Says What Every Angry CEO Thinks About AI. Dr. Karp (yes, he has a PhD), co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, is upset about how AI companies are using relationships with their business customers to collect data and business insights from those customers. “Something went completely wrong,” he fumed.
Now, this is Palantir, mind you; He may not have invented surveillance capitalism, but he may have perfected it. It has become essential for governments and large corporations around the world. Most of us are aware of how tech companies like Meta or Google provide us with “free” services that exist primarily to collect more data about us, which they then use to target ads to us, but Palantir’s data collection and analysis operates at a level we often don’t recognize. But make no mistake; is using our data, and not necessarily in our best interests.
Higgins quotes former White House AI czar David Sacks in support of Dr. Karp’s concerns:
Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal and, of course, Claude Code, each of which expands into categories previously served by companies based on its models. The pattern is consistent: observe where value is created and then act directly. Master the model layer and then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.
So it’s a delicious irony that Dr. Karp and others find themselves on the wrong side of the power inequality with their data.
I find myself thinking about healthcare when I think about this new wave of data collectors/synthesizers. It seems pretty clear that AI companies are not going anywhere and are expected to reshape most industries, including healthcare. Much has been written about the use of AI in healthcare, including by myself. It is inevitable and, in many cases, desirable. Now, this question of AI’s insatiable appetite for data makes me wonder if we’re looking at things wrong.
I’ve worked in healthcare for longer than I care to admit, and at no point have people complained that healthcare in general, and health insurance in particular, was too expensive. And yet costs have continued to rise. we are getting closer $6 trillion in healthcare spending in the US.. No matter what type of health insurance you have: great employer, small employer, ACA Market, Medicare Advantagemoment Medicare Supplements for traditional Medicare: Your premiums (and/or out-of-pocket costs) are likely to increase at rates we haven’t seen in years.
Two well-known facts about rising costs are, one, that it’s not so much that we’re using too many services but that Americans pay much higher prices for health care than in most countries, and, two, that a A relatively small percentage of people represent the vast majority. or health expenditure. The latter has an insidious effect on health insurance premiums, as people with fewer expenses are less likely to have or maintain health insurance, making premiums for the remaining people higher. No one wants to pay for people who use healthcare a lot, but they want other people to help pay if they end up being one of those people. It’s an enigma.
Now, optimists hope that AI can do a better job of identifying all the wasted, unnecessary or inappropriate attention we use. It is estimated that one third – and help make administration more efficient; current levels They are estimated between 15% and 30% of the expense. Good goals, both, and it’s entirely plausible that AI could help with both. But it would still be the case that sick people are the “problem” with our health care spending and health insurance premiums, and I want to propose a different way of looking at them.
Healthcare generates massive amounts of data, which is increasing all the time. Some estimates Put it right at the exabyte level, which, believe me, is much more than any of us can comprehend. We generate data when we go to the doctor, when we do lab tests, when we fill a prescription, when we go to the hospital, even when we use a wearable device like a smartwatch. All those health insurance claims and all those healthcare bills generate data. And yet, most of that data is not used effectivelywhich I hope the AI does something about.
So we have a system where people who use more health services generate more data and an artificial intelligence industry that craves data. It seems like it should be a perfect match.
Why couldn’t we have a healthcare system where AI companies pay the people who generate healthcare data for that data? That is, instead of high users of healthcare being drivers of spending, do they become a valuable resource? And, by the way, why? they are not Do they pay us for our data?
Our data, including health data, is now shared, bought and sold. Sometimes it is not identified (supposedly), sometimes it is not. Either way, we’re not the ones getting paid for it. That should change.
Now, realists will point out that that “value” of our healthcare data is nowhere near the costs of our healthcare, so paying for the latter with the former is impractical. I admit that is true today, but I will also ask: why?
I would say that our health data is tremendously undervalued, because the companies that use it are used to obtaining it at very low prices, and that our health services are tremendously overvalued. Reorienting the system so that the former finance the latter should bring them closer to balance.
If data is, as has been said, the new oil, then I will point out that oil was once very cheap too, until enterprising people discovered that they could control the supply and thus increase the price practically at will. We should be those people when it comes to our data, especially our healthcare data.
So I’ll be amused that Dr. Karp is falsely outraged at other data companies profiting from his company’s data, and I hope we have a fundamental rethink about who creates value in our data world and how that value is obtained. There may be no better place to do this than healthcare.
Kim is a former e-marketing executive at a major Blues scheme, publisher of the late and lamented Tincture.ioand now a regular contributor to THCB
