Turkish healthcare is often praised as a “miracle.” Public hospitals everywhere. Universal access. A hybrid system combining private and public. But miracles don’t hold up under inspection — especially when the inspectors work for the ones making money.

Let’s start with structure. On the surface, Turkey has both public and private healthcare systems operating in parallel. Public hospitals are state-run, with standardized procedures and pricing. Private hospitals are “free” to operate — but only within very specific parameters. They require licenses, are subject to ministry inspections, and are tightly controlled when it comes to partnerships and expansions.

In theory, that means regulation. In practice, it means leverage — and a playground for lobbies.

Healthcare is one of Turkey’s most profitable industries. From MRI machines to gloves, from data infrastructure to medicine delivery chains — everything needs to be bought. And guess who gets the contracts? Spoiler: not the ones with the best offer, but often the ones closest to power. The current health minister owns one of the largest medical supply companies in the country. A previous one was the face behind a private hospital chain. If you think that’s just a coincidence, you haven’t been paying attention.

This conflict of interest isn’t hidden. It’s baked into the system.

The result? A market where it’s easier to open a chain of wellness clinics if you have connections than to open a neighborhood clinic if you’re a young doctor with a vision. The licenses are not distributed based on health needs — they’re distributed based on who plays nice with the bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, public hospitals carry the weight of it all. This is where young doctors are trained, usually through specialization programs that also classify them as civil servants. That means long hours, low pay, high expectations — and no control over their own schedules. A cardiology resident in a public hospital in Istanbul might see over 100 patients a day. The math doesn’t add up. Neither does the morality.

After completing their specializations, doctors are required to serve two years in rural placements. Officially, this is about providing equity. Unofficially, it’s a way of plugging the holes in a system that never planned long-term. Once those two years are done, nearly every doctor with an ounce of energy left tries to transfer to a private hospital. Can you blame them?

Private hospitals offer better pay, more predictable hours, and cleaner working conditions. But that “better life” comes with its own strings. Many private institutions limit consultation time, nudge doctors into pushing unnecessary diagnostics, or prioritize cosmetic procedures over critical care — because that’s where the money is.

At the end of this conveyor belt, you have two kinds of doctors:
- Those burnt out by public service and trying to forget it ever happened.
- And those trapped in private institutions where health becomes a metric on a spreadsheet.

And above them all, the real players — the suppliers, the license distributors , the quiet boards where decisions are made — keep growing richer, untouchable and unelected.

This is not a broken system. This is a very functional system — just not for patients or doctors. It works perfectly well for those who designed it to profit from both care and crisis.

So when we talk about reform, let’s stop pretending we’re dealing with inefficiency. We’re dealing with ownership.
Who owns the hospitals?
Who owns the medical supply chains?
Who owns the policies?
And maybe most importantly — who owns our exhaustion?

All cultures begin with logistics. You can romanticize it all you want, but the most sacred rituals in the world started with a question like: “How do we store grain?” or “Where’s the nearest well?”

People don’t move because of dreams — they move because of drought. Or interest rates. Or because the bus line was discontinued. I’ve seen entire communities unravel because a bakery closed. I’ve seen people “lose their identity” because their phone bill tripled and their social life vanished with their Wi-Fi.

We talk about language death and cultural loss like they’re tragic accidents. They’re not. They’re predictable consequences of infrastructure decay and economic displacement. A village doesn’t stop singing because the youth lost interest — they stop singing because the youth had to migrate to a city where walls are thin and neighbors complain.

This is what I mean when I say money and water are the real gods. They shape where we live, how we gather, what we celebrate. If the pipe breaks, the ritual ends. If rent goes up, tradition moves online — and dies there slowly.

The worst part? We keep blaming it on "modernity" or "Westernization." No. The real killer of culture is the cost of living. Culture can survive war and colonization, but it can’t survive a 40% increase in electricity bills and no safe place to meet after 8 p.m.

Anthropologists should stop interviewing elders and start interviewing city planners and landlords. If you want to map cultural change, look at utility bills. Look at where the buses no longer go. That’s where the story is.