Derya Uğur
General Health Workers‘ Union – TURKEY

The government and the capital are attacking the health system in an organized manner with steps of privatization.

The system, which fails to prioritize life, nature and human beings, traps the society between illness and death.

Privatization means the transfer of public goods and services to partisan companies and international capital.

Privatization is being carried out rapidly all over the world and in our country, including the health sector.

Privatization of health services is being carried out through different practices.

Privatization affects both health workers and the public who benefit from the health services.

The inequality in health care is still a prominent problem.

The future of the Republic of Turkey is being destroyed by privatization.

It is clear that the political power is carrying out policies that will liquidate all public resources over the years.

The industry, trade, transportation, ports, oil, cities, tourism, ports and banks of the Republic of Turkey, in particular the right to public health, have all been sold to domestic and foreign capital for a small price through various legal regulations.

During its founding years, the Republic of Turkey, that inherited a public healthcare system in very unfavorable conditions, with its policies and efforts to prioritize public healthcare, created institutions that produce their own vaccines and medicines.

However, the political power has disrupted our health system by turning health institutions dysfunctional, closing them down, orienting towards the purchase of everything and privatizing the system.

The government has established a system that is oriented towards making money from patients which guarantees a patient number for the companies, not preventive health services and ensuring health.

The government has closed down well-functioning hospitals and left them to rot by taking steps that degrade the institutions and disregard equity and merit, and started to build giant hospitals outside the cities at very high costs.

Hospitals built outside the city through the Public Private Sector Partnership (PPP) model, these hospitals are called „city hospitals“.

In this model, the private sector in PPPs demands government guarantees to ensure that all risks are borne by the public sector, and these guarantees are given to partisan companies behind closed doors.

With the PPP model, resources are transferred from citizens‘ pockets to the capital.

There are many problems with the city hospitals constructed with the financing model called PPP.

Public hospitals are closed down not only in Ankara and Istanbul but all over Turkey and resources are transferred to capital through city hospitals.

In this model, contracts are kept secret, and 25-year guaranteed rent payments are made for the hospitals in foreign currency and over inflation.

The Ministry of Health could build the hospital itself with the huge budget it transfers to the companies that build city hospitals.

Unfortunately, under this model, very important hospitals all over Turkey have been closed down, demolished, downsized or turned into polyclinics.

In this system, easily accessible hospitals located in the inner city were closed down, making it more difficult for patients to access health services.

One of the most prominent and most propagandized topics during the period of this government has been the city hospitals and the health system.

However, citizens cannot find a doctor to consult at the hospitals and therefore cannot make medical appointments.

If they do get an appointment, only 5 minutes of examination time is seen as appropriate.

Once examined, there are sometimes difficulties in performing many tests, some surgeries have to be postponed due to lack of medical equipment, or citizens are forced to receive services from private hospitals.

The institutions and hospitals, which were the pride of the country, have been destroyed.

The doctors, nurses, academics, in short, all health workers of the country have become unable to practice their profession due to privatization.

Physicians and health workers seek refuge abroad because of the policies that do not prevent the violence they face and because their profession is degraded.

With the spread of privatization practices, fewer health workers are being asked to do more work, working hours are being extended and precarious working conditions are being demanded.

The system called public-private sector partnership is a complete robbery system.

Public resources are being transferred to partisan companies and the state is suffering losses.

The health system is one of the issues that the government propagandizes the most.

We identify the root cause of the current problems as the political power’s commercialization of health and its marketist approach to health!

• There is no logic in defending a system where health has become an object of consumption rather than a right, where it has become increasingly difficult to receive health services from the public services, where patients cannot get an appointment and wait for months or fill emergency services.
• A system where all health workers are struggling with countless problems from education to working conditions and personal rights will be corrected not by privatization, but by a public health system.
• The city hospitals model, which is the new form of privatization in health in our country, should be abandoned; a hospital system based on meeting the health needs of the society by using public resources, where treatment services can be provided effectively and holistically, should be implemented.

We, as Genel Sağlık-İş, declare once again that the future of the country’s health system cannot be determined by privatization and city hospitals.

We reiterate our demand that the NATIONAL, PUBLIC, and PEOPLE ORIENTED health policies initiated by our Great Leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk be reintroduced, just as it was a hundred years ago, and that all citizens can benefit from equal, accessible, qualified and free health services.

* This article is published simultaneously in PoliTeknik International and PoliTeknik Español.