This book explores the transformation in the healthcare system in Turkey since 2003, which has been portrayed as a benchmark for building universal healthcare systems in emerging market economies. Focussing on healthcare politics in an under-researched developing country context, it fills a significant lacuna in existing scholarship. This study answers these questions: What were the political dynamics that enabled the introduction of healthcare reform in Turkey? What political conflicts did the reform generate? How and to whose benefit have these conflicts been resolved? Drawing on qualitative interviews with a diverse set of actors, Yılmaz explores the actors’ subjective interpretations of the reform, the discourses and strategies they used to influence the reform, and the changing healthcare politics scene. He demonstrates that the reform has been a complex political process within which actors negotiated whether and to what extent healthcare remains a citizenship right or a commodity. This book will appeal to students and scholars of social policy, politics, health policy, public health and sociology.

Ensuring equity in healthcare is the main concern of health policymakers in order to provide a sustainable health system. This concern is more prominent in developing countries due to the scarcity of resources. This book provides a comprehensive analysis and discussion on the distributive pattern of out-of-pocket pharmaceutical expenditures under the health reforms in Turkey and makes comparisons with pharmerging countries. Turkey’s health reforms began in 2003 to address shortcomings related to financial protection and to improve health outcomes and the quality of healthcare services. The primary motivation was to ensure equity in the distribution of health resources, and this transformation process led to profound changes in how these resources were used, and in health financing in general. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the long-term effect of health reforms on the distribution patterns of health expenditures and health service use. This book offers a thorough equity analysis of the health financing system, affected by this health transformation program. Index and curve approaches are used in the equity analysis of pharmaceutical expenditures. The book examines the long-term effects of health system regulations on the health spending characteristics of households and improves the current understanding of equity in this context. It includes extensive international comparisons of healthcare services across a range of developing countries and highlights the significance of ensuring equity for emerging economies. The author explores the existing evidence as well as future research directions and provides policy and planning advice for health policymakers to contribute to establishing a more equal health system design. Additionally, the book will be of interest to scholars and professionals in the fields of health economics, public health management and health financing.

This book presents findings produced by micro- and meso-level analysis of policy networks using the Turkish context as a new case study and demonstrates that networks have become an integral part of the practice of policy making within the Turkish health sector.

Increased and ageing population is putting enormous stress on existing health care infrastructure. Governments around the world need to address this issue with limited budgets. Governments have initiated health reform programs around the globe. These may include very decentralized program by Pakistan and a quite successful reform program of Turkey. Unfortunately most of the reforms end up in failure and do not provide the foreseen results. A careful assessment of any such initiative is required and any such program should also be considered as change management rather than health reforms alone. This research aimed to study the 2002 Health Reforms Initiative launched by Government of Turkey as a Change Management case. Health Policy Cycle (HPC) was used as a tool to implement the change that is similar to Six Sigma tool. Collected data was fed to DICE Scoring System that provided a prediction regarding success chances of the change process. The results obtained through interviews were compared with the predictions made by the DICE tool. The book provides important insight to policy makers, project managers as well general readers about various aspects of health reforms program.