Allowing Google to run an ad campaign targeting their members wasn’t the benefit Blue Cross was talking about, that’s a side effect from them not turning off the data sharing option in the Google analytics settings.

The analytics data is used for prioritizing development work. If a tool they have on the website relies on a library that isn’t compatible with a new version of React for instance, do they know how many people use it? Having analytics allows you to decide what’s worth spending the development time to maintain.