Reforms and physicians’ status in Turkey : distribution of OOP health expenditures for physicians and hospitals

Abstract EN

Turkish health care reforms brought about significant changes regarding the way physicians practice.

Dual-time practice, which was very common among public hospital physicians, was gradually banned.

While public insurance coverage has been extended to private hospitals, private practices have been left out.

The resulting system rendered physicians more attached to the hospitals, public and private, and decreased their independence.

This study explores the change in out-of-pocket payments to physicians and hospitals from 2003, the year reforms started, to 2013.

We use a finite mixture model to examine changes in small and large expenditures.

Our findings show a steep drop in payments to physicians both for small and large sums of payments.

For hospitals, the drop in the size of the payments appear to be compensated by an increase in the number of households making a payment.