To Loot or Not to Loot?

Konya is a province in Turkey. On 6 July 2022, about an hour before I started writing this article, a murder news hit the Turkish pages of the internet: “In Konya City Hospital, a patient shot and killed a cardiologist and his secretary today.” Whether the assassin died by suicide or the private security killed him is unknown, although these are both rumours.

City hospitals, the third largest public–private partnership (PPP) endeavour in Turkey, are the second leg of the Healthcare Reform Programme started by the governing Justice and Development Party (JDP) after it won the election in the late 2002. Also known as the Health Transformation Programme, the World Bank supported the programme from its initiation in 2003 with two adaptable programme loans. The World Bank also provided technical guidance and shared the experiences of other countries (World Bank 2018). The second leg is officially known as the Health PPP Programme (also supported and partially funded by the World Bank) and started in 2010 (IFC 2018).