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The Politics of Healthcare Reform in Turkey pp 23–45Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Politics of Healthcare: A Critical Review of the Literature

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Abstract

This chapter offers answers to the following questions: How can we understand healthcare politics today? What is at stake, and for whom? An overview of the historical foundations of healthcare policy is followed by an exploration of the political nature of the debates surrounding healthcare policies and an introduction to different theoretical takes. Drawing on these theoretical approaches, the chapter presents the political economic context within which healthcare reforms have come onto the political agenda in various countries including Turkey after the 1970s.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Increasing prioritisation of curative healthcare services over preventive healthcare services in the last century has been harshly criticised in the literature e.g. Navarro 1976, pp. 19–20).

  2. 2.

    This dominance of curative healthcare in contemporary societies originates from the ‘therapeutic revolution’ in Western medicine. The therapeutic revolution is known as the transformation of the dominant paradigm in medicine due to the genesis of the germ theory of disease, which promotes the idea that ‘each disease had a well-defined cause and its control could best be achieved by attacking the causative agent or if this was not possible, by focusing treatment on the affected part of the body’. See Dubos, R. J. 1987. Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress and Biological Change, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press. Scholars argue that there is both an economic and ideological elective affinity between the germ theory of disease and capitalism, which together culminated in the dominance of curative healthcare. See Navarro, V. 1976. Social Class, Political Power, and the State: Their Implications in Medicine. Medicine Under Capitalism. New York and London: Prodist and Croom Helm, Doyal, L., Pennell, I. 1994. The Political Economy of Health, London, Pluto Press

  3. 3.

    Healthcare policy can be defined as a subset of health policy. See Walt, G. 1994. Health Policy: An Introduction to Process and Power, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, London and New Jersey: Zed Books, Moran, M. 1999. Governing the Healthcare State: A Comparative Study of the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press. Health policy is a term that refers to the whole set of policies that directly or indirectly affects the well-being of individuals and the environment in which individuals live. In other words, as Blank and Burau put it, health policy can be defined as any policy action that has health implications. See Blank, R. H., Burau, V. 2010. Comparative Health Policy, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan, ibid. According to this definition, health policy includes a wide range of policy domains from urban planning to consumer protection. In line with these broad policy domains that health policy refers to, the literature on health policy addresses relationships between the well-being of societies and a wide range of other factors such as environment, demography, and social inequalities. See Wilkinson, R., Pickett, K. 2010. The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone, London, Penguin Books.

  4. 4.

    The level of healthcare expenditures in countries is in positive correlation with the level of GDP per capita. The higher a country’s GDP per capita, the more it spends on healthcare. See Wall, A. 1996. Conclusion. In: Wall, A. (ed.) Healthcare Systems in Liberal Democracies. London and New York: Routledge, Moran, M. 1999. Governing the Healthcare State: A Comparative Study of the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, Blank, R. H., Burau, V. 2010. Comparative Health Policy, Hampshire, Palgrave Macmillan

    Comparative studies of health expenditures in countries with similar levels of GDP per capita, however, demonstrate that the levels of healthcare expenditures in these countries display a significant variation, which led to the growth of the healthcare system typologies debate that I will discuss later in this chapter. See Wall, A. 1996. Conclusion. In: Wall, A. (ed.) Healthcare Systems in Liberal Democracies. London and New York: Routledge, Wendt, C., Frisina, L., Rothgang, H. 2009. Healthcare System Types: A Conceptual Framework for Comparison. Social Policy & Administration, 43, 70–90.

  5. 5.

    Things gain meaning due to their use-values for human beings. These things, that are of use to human beings, start to bear an exchange-value when they stand in relation to each other. The imaginary construct that brings commodities in relation to each other is the idea of market.

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  1. Graduate Program in Social Policy, Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Volkan Yılmaz

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Yılmaz, V. (2017). The Politics of Healthcare: A Critical Review of the Literature. In: The Politics of Healthcare Reform in Turkey. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53667-5_2

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