Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, whose data analytics company Palantir Technologies Inc. is vying for a £480 million ($595 million) National Health Service data contract, has described British people’s affection for the state-backed health service as “Stockholm syndrome.”
The venture capitalist’s comments came during a Q&A session after a speech at the Oxford Union, a 200-year-old debating society, on Monday. He also said that the crisis-stricken health service, currently grappling with strikes and long wait times for emergency care, was making people sick and needs “market mechanisms” to fix it. Such mechanisms include privatizing parts of it, avoiding rationing and loosening regulations.