A professor's healthcare outcry

The Minister of Health has changed, and I am certain that the recent troubles in the healthcare sector are behind this change.

Since there is no longer a proper and impartial media order in Turkey, there is hardly anyone reporting on what is happening. Media outlets close to the government prevent the reflection of even the slightest negativity, while opposition media outlets, partly due to the difficulty of spending money on news, spend their days every evening gathering three people and engaging in hours of sterile political debates; they talk for hours because a politician looked at someone the wrong way, just for the sake of filling airtime.

However, if they were to put on the table why the Minister of Health changed, what is happening in healthcare, why citizens are dissatisfied, and that the government might have lost votes for this reason alone, there are many people to talk to, but where are they?

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I recently ran into a university professor I know, who is a doctor, on the subway. In an 8-10 minute standing conversation, he explained the following:

Healthcare has become one of the biggest problems in Turkey.

Citizens cannot benefit from the state's healthcare systems; mechanisms have already been developed to ensure they don't.

Over 2 million—yes, more than 2 million people—are paying large sums of money for private health insurance for this very reason.

The government is trying every possible way to steer citizens toward private hospitals and to help private hospitals thrive.

Private hospitals have become monopolies; a few brands are growing larger and larger.

The path to receiving proper healthcare for those without money has been closed; if your wallet is empty, private hospitals won't even look at you.

Private hospitals and insurance companies are the biggest winners in this business.

Efforts are being made to fleece every citizen who receives services in private hospitals, whether insured or uninsured.

Private hospitals make citizens undergo unnecessary procedures to inflate the bill.

Private hospitals are no longer renewing their medical devices and equipment in line with developments; their technology has become obsolete.

In general, 10-year-old equipment is being used in private hospitals.

My dear professor also has concerns about medical education; according to him, medical education is no longer what it used to be. There is neither good education being provided nor any effort to train good academics.

Let me add some of my own personal observations to all of this.

The appointment system in state hospitals has still not been fixed; state hospitals today are just like the scene of an SSK hospital I was forced to go to 20 years ago.

The time allotted for doctors to examine patients has become almost a matter of seconds.

The city hospital fiasco continues at full speed; getting an appointment is a hassle, and going there is a hassle.

But the shops and shopping malls inside the city hospitals have become the biggest sources of profit for government cronies.

By not punishing those who beat doctors and by saying 'well done' to the attackers, they have turned the system into such a state that no medical graduate wants to specialize in very demanding fields like obstetrics, cardiovascular surgery, neurology, or neurosurgery anymore.

Instead of these difficult branches, medical graduates are trying to specialize in fields that do not require much effort, such as aesthetics or dermatology.

Therefore, in the future, it will become difficult to find doctors who perform heart surgeries or brain surgeries.

Health tourism is developing, but cronyism is at work here too; cronies are protected, and no negative news is published. We can only see the scandals happening in Turkey and the stories of people who have died or become ill in the British press.

They asked the camel, 'Why is your neck crooked?' and it replied, 'What part of me is straight?'