Plunder in healthcare: 'Not a health center, but a place of business'

Ulaş KARAAĞAÇ

Family health centers (ASM) are the places some of us visit when we are sick, and others go to get reports for employment. Healthcare workers in ASMs are tested between their conscience and long working hours. Moreover, this test is conducted for human life, which is perhaps the most precious thing of all. This situation began in the 1980s, when liberal policies began to show their impact in every field. The healthcare system, deprived of public resources, began to look at our pockets rather than our health through private hospitals. With the Family Medicine System, implemented in 2005 under the name of transformation in health, healthcare workers began to be virtually consumed. Healthcare workers, trying to provide services under difficult conditions, have been subjected to violence and, unfortunately, continue to be.

During the AKP government, the field of health also received its share from the liquidation of all public resources. Let us remember; we are talking about a healthcare system that could not even distribute 5 masks for free during the pandemic process, we are talking about a liquidation where the Minister of Health is literally a hospital owner. It is necessary to underline that all this transformation is not a failure, but a very clear choice. This choice traps healthcare workers between their conscience and their pockets, and deprives citizens of healthcare services.

Tolga Şahin's book titled "Not a Health Center, But a Place of Business" was published by Kırmızı Kedi Publishing in June. It is a book that reveals, through the statements of healthcare workers, how healthcare services are systematically turned into a profit area. It exposes how the transformation in the healthcare system, especially in the last twenty years, has eroded the understanding of public service and replaced it with market logic.

Today, when healthcare services are no longer a human right but have become a commodity to be bought and sold, the transformation is not limited to the privatization of hospitals. The performance system causes healthcare workers to turn into sales representatives and patients into customers.

The book sets out in points how this profit-oriented system has written off preventive healthcare services. The rendering of health centers, which were an inseparable part of neighborhoods in the past, dysfunctional and the family medicine model brought in their place, traps healthcare services in a curative model. Thus, both public health is pushed to the background and patients are pushed into the arms of the market-oriented approach thanks to chronic diseases.

The situation is summarized with the expressions in the book:

"A person who wanted to get an employment report in Adana attacked the family doctor with an electric kettle. Do you know what the reason for the attack was? The doctor saying that he could only provide a status report to patients not registered to him! The suspect, who dislocated the doctor's left arm, was arrested!"

"The system is already in shambles; the doctor, who has been turned into a subcontractor, is thinking hard about whether to pay the employee's salary, the building's rent, or the electricity, water, and natural gas bills with the pittance given to them, while the ASM group staff are also worried about how to make ends meet with their pittance!"

"They even count the toilet paper, giving one roll per person per month. At one point, we couldn't find gloves; they wouldn't buy gloves for dressing wounds."

"Not a Health Center, But a Place of Business" forces the reader to think about the commodification of healthcare services, while at the same time offering clues on how to resist this process. This book, which is an important reference source for those who want to understand the impact of neoliberalism on our health, is not just a critique text, but also a call to awakening.

In the hope of reaching the days when we will win that health is a fundamental human right, not a tool of trade; and in the hope of reaching the days when we condemn this profit-oriented system that is being staged, instead of condemning the violence that healthcare workers are subjected to...

Thanks to all healthcare workers who work with devotion despite inhumane conditions.

News Source: 12punto