Turkey’s so-called city hospitals — sprawling medical complexes that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has touted as a “dream” project — have come to produce such colossal bills for taxpayers that not even prodigality could explain away the irrational “build-operate-lease” model on which they rest. While the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic has overshadowed the unprecedented costs, monthly budget spending figures by the Health Ministry suggest that the city hospitals might swallow up tens of billions of dollars in public money by the time their 25-year contracts with the government end.
Amid Turkey’s growing economic woes, the companies operating the hospitals were paid 4.8 billion Turkish liras ($645.5 million) by the government for rent and services in the first seven months of the year, with the two categories representing roughly equal sums. Based on the cost of publicly owned hospitals, that money could have financed the construction of 10 hospitals with a capacity of 1,000 beds each. Moreover, the contracts have been denominated in euros, meaning that the cost of the payments the companies receive keep increasing amid the continued depreciation of the lira.
