The Coronavirus Is Exposing the Flaws of Erdogan's Strongman Rule

By Asli Aydintasbas, The Washington Post

01 April 20

n Turkey, a video of a truck driver went viral this week, as he voiced the feelings of millions of working-class Turkish citizens too poor to observe the government’s stay-home advice.

“Now you are telling me to self-quarantine at home. Man, how can I?” he asked. “I don’t have a pension. Am not a state employee. Am not rich. I am a worker, a truck driver. If I don’t work, I have no bread. I cannot pay the rent, the electricity or water bill. That’s worse than dying. Before you ask us to stay home … stop making a fool of yourself. Take measures for us so we can take precautions for ourselves. Either I stay at home at your word and die from hunger or I die from the virus. In the end, it’s not the virus but your system that will kill me.”

Within days, he was detained.

The episode reveals the dual problems Turkey is facing today: illiberalism and economic mismanagement. Both have been exacerbated under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s one-man regime in ways that are now fully exposed by the novel coronavirus.

Of course, the pandemic is presenting all types of challenges for governments across the globe. In the Turkish case, with early measures and a vigorous stay-home policy, there is reason to be hopeful that “the curve” will not be as steep as in Italy or the United States. The streets of Istanbul have been empty for two weeks, and the compulsive in-house hygiene of Turkish households may prove to be a good thing after all. Schools, restaurants, malls, offices and mosques have been shut down, and the country is in a virtual lockdown.

But not for everyone. Factories and construction sites are still running, and the meager $15 billion stimulus Erdogan announced last week is among the lowest in the Group of 20 countries. Only $300 million is earmarked in the government stimulus bill as a one-time direct payment to families in need (2 million families are to receive roughly $150) and the stimulus for companies is deferred debt payment or more lending from state banks. Instead of offering more support to citizens in need, Erdogan was on air this week announcing a bank account number for donations.

Turkey had been broke long before the virus came along, due to a combination of bad macro decisions and its declining political prestige, souring the once-stellar investment climate. It’s a systemic problem: When one man’s will replaces all institutional policymaking, inevitably there are mistakes.

As the sole decision-maker in the economy, Erdogan has been insistent on high government spending and created a classical developing world construction bubble, with projects that span from one of the world’s biggest airports to a bridge across the Dardanelles or another bridge across Bosporus going to cronies. (The government even had a tender last week to start the construction on Canal Istanbul, another one of Erdogan’s pet projects to build a costly sea channel in Istanbul parallel to the Bosporus.)

With dangerously low reserves in the central bank, Turkey cannot tell its citizens “It’s all right. I’ll take care of you if you stay home.”

The state of our democracy is far worse. For authorities, controlling the flow of information and suppressing dissent seems to be just as important as stopping the spread of the virus. Official figures on the coronavirus are announced by the minister of Health only, with no location or geographical detail. A doctor who digressed from the official figures in an in-house workshop was made to publicly apologize, and a woman who posted a video on social media showing a newly dug graveyard was called in for questioning. There is apparently a law that says you can be jailed for “spreading misinformation” to create social panic — in this case about the virus.

The Turkish president was once a champion of democracy and expanded the share of the lower income bracket in the economic pie with reforms in health care and the economy. But with declining popularity and too long a tenure, Erdogan is now at the helm of a regime that puts preservation of the status quo above everything else.

The truck driver from the viral video was finally released thanks to the public outcry. In explaining his detention, Turkey’s minister of Interior said, with no irony, “I look to make sure that he is really downtrodden — to know there isn’t an ulterior motive.” He noted that 2,752 social media accounts were identified for propagating misinformation: “Most are outside the country,” he noted. “We’re trying to detain as many as possible.”

The Turkish case violates what political scientists call “the authoritarian bargain.” Authoritarian regimes can sustain power not only through repression but because, like the Gulf countries, they distribute resources to citizens. In Turkey, we seem to get neither the money nor the democracy — which is why the current model is not sustainable. Our society is far more advanced than this outdated system.

Coronavirus Makes It More Clear Than Ever: Health Care Is a Human Right

By Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun-Times

01 April 20

The COVID-19 crisis exposes the foolishness of pretending that health care is a private marketplace.

ho is going to pay for this? 

For months that question was used as a weapon against supporters of Medicare for All. Now, it is on everyone’s mind as they worry about the costs of the testing and treatment for the coronavirus. The virus is highly contagious. We need everyone with symptoms to get tested and all with the virus to get treatment. If anyone hesitates because they fear they can’t afford the cost, they put the rest of us at risk. 

No one should be worried about the costs of treatment.

Those costs, however, are going to be staggering, particularly if the fears of the administration’s leading expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, are realized and a million or more may become infected with the disease. Hospitalization and treatment will cost hundreds of billions. The average cost of hospitalization for pneumonia patients is about $20,000, but many coronavirus patients tend to need to stay on ventilators longer and fight off more complications than pneumonia patients.

Across the country, Americans are terrified at the potential costs if they get sick. Twenty-seven million Americans have no health insurance at all. Four in 10 working Americans have a high-deductible plan that forces them to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket before they get benefit from the premiums taken out of their paychecks each week. 

A 2009 Harvard Medical School study estimated that every year an estimated 45,000 people in the U.S. die because of lack of health care coverage. Many suffer because they put off necessary treatment because they can’t afford it. Now, as Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Cal., put it, “The reality is, there are a lot of people that are thinking, ‘I don’t want a couple thousand-dollar bill to get tested or get treated.’”

The rescue bill just passed by Congress covers the costs of testing. Trump promised that any cost of treatment also would be covered, but the insurance lobby immediately corrected him. Since then, under immense pressure, Cigna and Humana have joined CVS Aetna insurance in agreeing to waive patient cost-sharing on treatment for those insured. 

Hopefully, this will reassure people enough that they won’t avoid getting tested and treated, posing the threat to all. But this won’t be charity. Some health-care analysts think the insurance industry could benefit from the pandemic because people generally are putting off visits to doctors and hospitals as much as possible. 

In any case, insurers admit that if the costs soar they will factor it into the cost of plans next year. As Peter Lee, the head of Covered California, an independent state agency, noted, insurers are likely to seek rates next year that are double their additional costs from the virus. If costs go up 20 percent, rates could jump as much as 40 percent. That could mean, Lee warned “that many of the 170 million Americans in the commercial market may lose their coverage and go without needed care.” 

The insurers will sustain their profits; it’s the patients who will suffer.

The government is investing billions of dollars to develop a vaccine for the virus, and to develop other drugs that can help treat it. Yet, because the government turns over any drug developed to the private pharmaceutical companies, Health Secretary Alex Azar — a former lobbyist for the drug companies — said he couldn’t guarantee that the treatments would be affordable. Already, as the Intercept reported, bankers are goading drug companies to prepare to raise prices to benefit from the expected demand. 

The U.S. spends about twice as much per capita for its patchwork health-care system than most industrialized countries. Why were we caught with such shortages of masks, ventilators or hospital beds? 

A central reason is that about $500 billion of what we spend on health care each year doesn’t go to health care. It is wasted on costly bureaucracies needed to bill the maze of private insurers or track down patients for their co-pays. It goes to hundreds of billions in profits for insurance companies and drug companies. It goes to excessive CEO salaries rising to $80 million or so a year.

In the end, the federal government will and should step up to cover the costs of all testing and treatment for the pandemic. It will have to reimburse states to cover soaring Medicaid and hospital costs. It will pay for developing the necessary drugs. It will pay for the costs of covering seniors under Medicare. It will pay for the costs incurred by those without insurance or with employer-based insurance. Yet, in part because of this, the insurance companies and drug companies will keep racking up record profits.

At this point, the overriding imperative is that every person in the U.S. understand that they should get the testing and treatment they need. All should be reassured that their costs will be covered. Congress went part of the way with the last rescue package. It should finish the job, preferably by having Medicare pay for all the costs directly.

But we shouldn’t be satisfied with single-payer coverage just during a massive pandemic. This crisis exposes dramatically the foolishness of pretending that health care is a private marketplace. Health care is a human right. This pandemic gives ample evidence of why we need to move to a Medicare for All system where high-quality health care is guaranteed to all.