Another friend just had her son’s urinary problems diagnosed at Versa. I, too, rushed there last summer when I wanted to have a worrisome ache checked out.We were all very happy with the treatment we received. Speed, cleanliness, efficiency -- we had nothing but praise for the service we had been given. Nevertheless, there is something slightly odd about this, because all three of us are people who in the UK would have argued that private medicine was a bad thing and that we should all have made our way immediately to the nearest National Health Service (NHS) facility.
One of the great things about coming to live in another country is the way that it frees you from dogmatic positions. The Turkish health system now allows citizens to put some of their social security financing toward the cost of treatment in private hospitals. In Göreme that means that almost everyone now opts to go private, and I have never heard anyone query the rights and wrongs of this. In the UK, however, the decision to use a private hospital brings punitive consequences. In particular, an individual ceases to be eligible for other services only offered by the NHS -- even though they will have contributed through their taxes to the cost of those services, and then paid again for the private ones.
I’m guiltily aware that were I still living in the UK I would probably be trying to defend this absurdity. Having moved here, however, where I can’t feel the same attachment to a political position, I’m forced, like most expats, to make my decisions purely on the grounds of what seems right (or possible) for me, rather than on what I believe to be right for society as a whole.
Common sense tells me, though, that the arguments remain the same here as they would have in the UK. There the objection to private hospitals was always that they allowed the better-off to buy themselves a higher standard of treatment than the less well-off and that as long as that was the case the better-off would have little incentive to press for higher standards all round.
It’s the same with schools, too, of course. Most expats I know send their children to private fee-paying schools, as do the better-off Turks. But I well remember standing on a terrace gazing out at the lovely view with a Turkish friend. “I’ve often said to my friends,” he said, “that if we all took our children out of the private school and put the money saved into the Göreme school, it would be better for everyone.” In England middle-class people of left-wing persuasion are even more racked with guilt over the subject of private education than they are over private medicine. Here in Turkey, however, we make our choices based on practicalities rather then ideology and don’t seem to lose much sleep over it. Are there lessons here about the way forward for the UK? I’m certainly beginning to wonder.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
