Turkey exempted foreign patients from its COVID-19 lockdowns as early as May 2020, admitting arrivals from thirty-one countries while its own residents were told to stay home, a Crown Center brief at Brandeis University reported. That scene, foreign men recovering from hair transplants on otherwise empty Istanbul streets, was offered by the brief as evidence of how far medical tourism had moved into government strategy. Brandeis argued that the policy sat awkwardly against the governing Justice and Development Party’s older promise to universalise health coverage for Turkish citizens.
The brief’s central claim is that the push into medical tourism has widened gaps in domestic care. By rewarding hospitals that earn foreign currency from foreign patients, the brief said, the system has steered technology, capacity and skilled staff toward private hospitals built to serve patients from abroad. Turkish citizens, nominally covered by universal insurance, are left with a more crowded public system.
From universal coverage to an export sector
Turkey’s reforms began with the Health Transformation Program, launched in 2003 after the 2001 economic crisis and shaped by advice from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the brief said. It put health under the General Health Insurance fund, known by its Turkish initials SGK, and reached almost all citizens. It also made the SGK a buyer of care from private as well as public hospitals, which gave private hospitals a stable stream of public money.
Private capacity grew quickly on that base. The number of private hospitals rose from 271 to 565 by 2023, the brief said, and providers won leave to charge co-payments of up to twice the public rate for standard care and up to three times for exceptional procedures. From 2015 the government added public-private “City Hospitals”, financed by private consortia and leased back to the state, and eighteen had been built by 2025. Between 2002 and 2012 the health workforce grew by 56 per cent, from about 295,000 to 460,000, the brief said.
Foreign patients, who pay in full and out of pocket, became the natural target for hospitals capped on domestic reimbursement. About one million people travelled to Turkey for hair transplants in 2022, generating some $2 billion, roughly half the country’s health tourism spending that year, the brief said. Cosmetic dentistry and plastic surgery drew a further $500 million and $400 million. The government has set a target of $20 billion in annual medical tourism revenue by 2028.
A state-run market
Turkey wrote the export drive into the state itself. The brief called this shift “state entrepreneurialism”, borrowing a term from the scholars Volkan Yilmaz and Puren Aktas. In 2019 the Ministry of Health set up a state enterprise, USHAS, to manage and promote medical tourism, the brief said, and by April 2025 a revised rule required all certified hospitals and brokers to join a central platform. Branding campaigns run by the Ministry of Trade and the Turkish Exporters Assembly now invite the world to heal in Turkey.
Doctors have pushed back. The Turkish Medical Association, known by its initials TTB, has taken the Ministry of Health to court over the 2025 rule, citing provider autonomy, patient data and commission-based brokerage, the brief said. In February 2026 the dispute broke into health-worker protests after physicians treating foreign patients were told to register with the state enterprise and pay a fee of 120,000 lira, about $2,700. The brief cited Dr Guray Kilic of the association, who told a December 2025 panel that medical tourism normalises treating health “not as a right, but as a consumer good”.
What the domestic figures show
Brandeis set the export success against a run of domestic numbers. More than a third of Turkey’s hospitals are now private, yet they account for only 6.3 per cent of all doctor’s visits, the brief said, leaving public hospitals to carry the rest. Between 2023 and 2025 treatable mortality, deaths avoidable with timely care, rose from 107 to 119 per 100,000 people, and preventable mortality rose from 126 to 168, the brief said. In 2025 only 41 per cent of citizens said they were happy with access to care, against an OECD average of 64 per cent and down from 53 per cent in 2023.
Staff have moved with the money. TTB figures cited by the brief record more than 21,000 specialists leaving public hospitals between 2012 and 2025, with 27 per cent of health workers and over 30 per cent of specialists now in private hospitals that treat a small share of the population. Acibadem, the largest private group, has opened hospitals in Serbia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and the Netherlands. One international patient coordinator told the author that foreign patients supplied about 70 per cent of revenue at their hospital and effectively all of its profit.
Turkey’s own account is not the only one to read the trade this way. Turkish operators frame the same business as a premier medical tourism destination and a sector fighting European rival campaigns, while the cosmetic niche that built the brand carries its own patient-safety risks when procedures go wrong.
What to watch
There is a standing frame for a case like this. Medical tourism run as an export can lift revenue and national image while the same money and staff drain from the wards that serve residents, and the two effects show up in different ledgers. Turkey’s revenue target is public and dated, and its satisfaction and mortality figures are measured on the same calendar. The test is whether the next OECD access survey and the next mortality figures move toward the export numbers or further away from them. The $20 billion target for 2028 will be checkable against those citizen figures long before the revenue is booked.
