The Ministry of Health arrived at the parliamentary budget commission like an orchestra determined to prove that, with the right sheet music, everything in the health system is in perfect harmony. The Minister spoke confidently of a Healthy Türkiye Century, a phrase repeated just often enough to suggest that merely saying it outloud might somehow lift life expectancy by a year or two. PowerPoint slides marched triumphantly across the screen: millions of screenings, millions of outpatient visits, millions of this, millions of that—proof, apparently, that when you count in large enough numbers, outcomes will eventually look impressive.

According to the Ministry’s presentation, the past year had been one of extensive legislative productivity: seventy-nine new pieces of health-related legislation had been adopted, and teams from the Ministry had visited all eighty-one provinces to assess existing structures, determine which practices should be preserved, and identify where improvements were needed — a nationwide tour de force so impressive that one could almost forget how little of this admirable mobility ever translates into the improvements allegedly being identified. It was, in other words, a year of heroic kilometre accumulation, if not necessarily of measurable progress: a kind of administrative pilgrimage where the journey itself is the achievement, and the destination — well, the destination can presumably wait for next year’s presentation.

Then came the familiar hymn of the “city hospitals,” the government’s beloved megastructures. They were portrayed as the shining cathedrals of Turkish healthcare—great vaults of marble and glass where efficiency, technology, and cost overruns walk hand in hand. No mention was made of the small detail that their daily operating cost could run an entire mid-sized European clinic for a month. But such numbers, the Ministry implied, should not distract from the grand vision: modernity requires monuments, and monuments require money—preferably a steady river of it.

When the presentation turned to prevention, the tone softened into something like aspiration. Yes, prevention was important; yes, they were investing. But somehow 58 percent of the entire ministry budget still flowed towards hospitals, because, as everyone knows, treating illnesses is always more glamorous than preventing them. Prevention does not cut ribbons; hospitals do.

Yet the opposition’s response—led most prominently by CHP’s Prof. Dr. Kayıhan Pala—painted a very different picture.

If the Ministry’s presentation had the tone of a motivational political speaker, Pala’s intervention felt more like the sudden appearance of a stern auditor who has read the footnotes. In simple terms, he there was to teach public........

© Birgün