"FAST HEALTH": MEDICAL POPULISM IN THE CASE OF TURKEY'S HEALTH TRANSFORMATION PROGRAM.

There has been a growing academic interest in populism, especially its rightwing variant, which is on the rise around the world. Populism professes an anti-establishment rhetoric and claims to represent 'common man' against dominant elites and professional cadres and has recently culminated in symbolically powerful events such as the election of Trump and Brexit. This paper looks at medical populism, as an understudied but important dimension of populism, and attempts to uncover its political-economic context and outcomes. It particularly focuses on the case of Turkish healthcare system, which has been undergoing comprehensive reform under Justice and Development Party (JDP) governments since 2003. The reform process combines the implementation of managerial and market-oriented principles in public hospitals with changes that aim at satisfying the 'patientconsumer' and that played an important role in helping JDP win several elections. The paper draws on a yearlong ethnographic study in two public hospitals in Istanbul, Turkey. Data collection methods include 74 interviews with physicians, other healthcare workers, and administrators; over 250 hours of non-participant field observation; and analysis of printed and online material related to the design, implementation, and outcomes of health care reform policies. The findings indicate that the health reform in Turkey creates a commodity of dubious quality via a celebrated process of expanding access and lowering barriers for the patients. More specifically, populism enables the diffusion of the market logic and its penetration into the healthcare sphere through a selective expansion of services and prioritization of patient satisfaction. I contend that the conjunction between populism, which takes healthcare as yet another source of voter mobilization, and market/neoliberal logic, which sees it as a source of economic gain and profit is particularly worrying in terms of its outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]