Palantir Now Touches Every Layer of American Healthcare. Here's What That Means

Palantir Technologies now claims that it powers more than 15% of the US healthcare system. Yes, a company built from the ground up to spy for the CIA has embedded itself into the heart of American medicine. And almost nobody is talking about it.

Using software that was already powerful enough to allegedly help the military hunt down Osama bin Laden over a decade ago, it now runs the inner workings of Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General Hospital, HCA Healthcare’s colossal 186-hospital network, and Nebraska Medicine. It controls everything from nurse scheduling and bed assignments to the moment a patient is sent home.

And now it's threaded into the very infrastructure that holds American healthcare together.

Palantir just partnered with The Joint Commission — the organization that accredits over 80% of US hospitals — meaning Palantir is now intertwined with the very system that decides whether a hospital meets the standards needed to keep its doors open, treat patients, or get paid by Medicare and Medicaid.

And about that Medicaid data. Palantir already had access to enormous amounts of it through its hospital partners. But in 2025, ICE was given access to the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid enrollees. Names, addresses, Social Security numbers, racial data. Palantir built a tool called ELITE that mines it all to map deportation targets and score how confident it is about where each person lives.

The same system tracking your hospital stay is tracking someone else’s for deportation.

No Bid, No Competition, No Oversight

Today, Palantir holds over $1.25 billion in federal health contracts. It built the system that decided where COVID vaccines went, who was vulnerable, and who was sick. And it got those contracts without competition. The government awarded Palantir $24.9 million in sole-source deals, meaning no other company was even given the chance to bid. The justification was that Palantir was the only one that could do it fast enough.

That’s how a surveillance company became the backbone of America’s pandemic response. It also tracks outbreaks for the CDC. And Peter Thiel’s protégé — Jim O’Neill — was put in charge of the CDC itself.

CDC Director Jim O’Neill, who has no medical training, once teamed up with Peter Thiel to work on creating man-made islands located outside U.S. territory.

Palantir’s healthcare partners include but aren’t limited to: The Joint Commission, Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General Hospital, HCA Healthcare, Lifepoint Health, Option Health Care, and Hone Health.

O’Neill spent nearly two decades working for Thiel. He was a managing director at Clarium Capital, one of Thiel’s hedge funds, then moved to Mithril Capital, Thiel’s venture capital firm, which has funded companies like Palantir. That same Mithril Capital? JD Vance worked there, too.

O’Neill also ran the Thiel Foundation and co-founded the Thiel Fellowship. He has no medical degree. No scientific training. His education is a bachelor’s and master’s in humanities from Yale (same college as Vance).

In June 2025, O’Neill was sworn in as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under RFK Jr.

Two months later, they pushed out the actual CDC director for refusing to follow orders not rooted in science or evidence-based practice. Three senior doctors walked out behind her. O’Neill was installed as her replacement. A man who once argued drugs should hit the market without being proven safe, and who has financial ties to biotech companies that stand to benefit from his position. Similar to Trump's pick for Surgeon General — Casey Means — a wellness influencer who co-founded a health tech company, has financial ties to the supplement industry, and quit her own medical residency. She's now in line to become the nation's top doctor.

That’s who’s running America’s disease response.

This is the infrastructure that American public health runs on. And if the next crisis hits, Palantir and its network will be making decisions about your health before you even know something is wrong after Trump's first pick was caught lying about her medical credentials.

There’s a pattern here. Every person they install has financial ties to the industry, zero commitment to evidence-based medicine, and a track record of fighting the very institutions they now control.

Palantir also runs the NIH’s COVID research database. Over 18 million patient records. Nearly 23 billion rows of clinical data from more than 65 institutions. Over 1,000 researchers use it, including teams studying Long COVID. That contract alone is worth over $100 million.

In 2022, the CDC gave Palantir a five-year, $443 million contract to merge every major pandemic tool the government has into one platform. Disease tracking, vaccine distribution, outbreak forecasting, and wastewater surveillance. All of it, running through one company.

The VA went even further. A $90 million contract in 2021 to integrate veteran health data. Then in October 2025, a $385.4 million deal. Palantir’s biggest single health contract ever. And to make sure no agency gets left out, HHS set up a $90 million blanket agreement in 2022 that lets the NIH, CDC, FDA, or any other agency under its umbrella buy Palantir software whenever they want.

TL;DR? Under Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again, Palantir kept getting no-bid contracts until it became the only option. Over $1.25 billion in health deals later, it runs disease tracking, vaccine distribution, outbreak forecasting, and veteran health data for the entire country.

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Palantir isn’t just inside the federal government. It’s inside the hospitals. too. And business is booming.

Tampa General Hospital was the first major partnership, starting in 2021. Palantir now runs over 12 different operations there, from predicting sepsis to managing patient flow.

Cleveland Clinic signed a multi-year deal in 2023 to build an AI command center across its 22-hospital system. HCA Healthcare, the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country with 186 hospitals, is a partner. So are Lifepoint Health, Nebraska Medicine, and Option Care Health.

Then as said above, in May 2025, Palantir partnered with The Joint Commission, the organization that accredits over 80% of US hospitals.

That means Palantir now has a role in the system that decides whether a hospital meets the standards needed to keep its doors open and is eligible to be paid by Medicare and Medicaid — which pay for about 70% of all hospital stays in the United States.

Palantir is also pushing into pharmaceuticals. It signed a deal with Parexel to run clinical trials across all phases. It partnered with OneMedNet, which sits on data from over 1,750 provider sites and 5 billion insurance claims. And it launched an AI lab targeting the $160 billion medical billing industry.

Remember that the company now claims it powers over 15% of the US healthcare system. And that number is growing.

Only one partner has walked away.

In March 2026, New York City’s public hospital system announced it would not renew its Palantir contract after activists exposed the deal and protested outside hospital doors. The CEO insisted there was a firewall between patient data and Palantir’s government clients like ICE. But by October, the contract will be dead.

So far, NYC is the exception. Everywhere else, Palantir is digging in deeper. Including in the United Kingdom where Palantir is deeply embedded into NHS.

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The Network Behind the Network

Palantir is just the front door. Behind it, Thiel and his network have clandestinely invested in more than 60 healthcare and biotech companies from cancer therapies like Stemcentrx and AngieX, to anti-aging ploys like Unity Biotechnology and the Methuselah Foundation, to brain implants with Elon Musk’s Neuralink and its competitor Blackrock Neurotech, to the psychedelic drug ventures like ATAI Life Sciences and Compass Pathways. They’ve backed EnClear Therapies for neurodegenerative devices that low disease progression in conditions like ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. They’ve backed Cambrian Genomics for synthetic DNA, and even fertility clinics like Rhea and Gaia.

His co-founder at Palantir — Joe Lonsdale — also runs a venture fund that co-founded and backed a biomanufacturing company named National Resilience. The board of directors features former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., and former CIA venture capitalist CEO Christopher Darby. Yes, the very same CIA venture capital branch (In-Q-Tel) that once paid for Palantir to be born.

Thiel personally takes human growth hormone daily, has signed up to be frozen after death, and once declared that “death is a problem that can be solved.”

This is a man with billions riding on the future of medicine, and his company just happens to sit inside every federal agency that decides which drugs get approved, which treatments get funded, and which companies get to win.

So, how does it all connect?

The same company processing patient records inside American hospitals built a tool called ELITE that mines Medicaid data to generate deportation dossiers for ICE.

The man who was overseeing the CDC thanks to Trump — Jim O’Neill — he had financial ties to medical startups regulated by the very agency he controlled.

And Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s “mass deportation strategy” holds a considerable financial stake in Palantir itself. Interestingly, so does Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The people building the healthcare system and the people building the deportation machine are not just working in the same government. They are the same people, investing in the same companies, and profiting from both sides.

The Consequences of It All?

Take a step back and look at the full picture. One company processes your health data inside the hospital. The same company helps ICE find people to deport using health data outside the hospital. The man who co-founded it has more than 60 investments in the industries his company oversees. His protégé ran the CDC. His other protégé is Vice President. His company gets billion-dollar contracts without competition. And almost nobody is connecting the dots. This is not a conspiracy theory. Every contract is public. Every appointment is documented. Every investment is on the record. The only thing missing is the outrage.

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