The Turkish Heath Ministry has accused German news outlet Der Spiegel of spreading disinformation and violating the basic principles of journalism in a report that focused on a hospital scandal in Turkey involving medical fraud for profit and newborn babies.
The story was published in the online edition of Der Spiegel on Monday, with the headline, “Erdoğans Problem mit der “Neugeborenen-Mafia” (Erdoğan’s problem with the newborn mafia), referring to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and questioning whether members of his government could have also benefited from the system.
Turkish prosecutors last October accused 47 doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers and other medical workers of neglect or malpractice in the death of at least 10 newborns.
The indictment and testimony also claim that the defendants withheld treatment and gave false reports to parents in order to keep hospital stays long as possible and to embezzle the social security system out of more money. The indictment alleges that the long-term stays coupled with patient mistreatment resulted in babies’ deaths.
In a series of posts on X on Tuesday, the Health Ministry, writing in German, accused Der Spiegel reporters Şebnem Arsu and Maximilian Popp, who wrote the report in question, of violating “the most basic rule of journalism” and targeting the state institutions that uncovered and dismantled the “newborn gang.”
The ministry said current Health Minister Kemal Memişoğlu was the person who personally initiated the investigation into the “newborn gang” during his tenure as head of the İstanbul Health Directorate, despite criticism of him in the story, which referred to his responsibility for overseeing the hospitals in İstanbul.
The story also said one of the hospitals involved in the scandal belonged to former health minister Mehmet Müezzinoğlu, a former classmate of Erdoğan.
Turkey’s opposition filed charges against both Müezzinoğlu and Memişoğlu for abuse of office.
In addition, the ministry refuted the magazine’s claims regarding the distribution of public and private hospitals in Turkey, accusing it of distorting statistical data to mislead its readership.
“The Erdoğan government has helped to ensure that the number of private clinics in Turkey has multiplied in recent years. In İstanbul, 164 of a total of 234 hospitals are now run privately. On the one hand, this better distributes the burden. On the other, critics complain that quality controls are neglected. For example, medical associations have been systematically disempowered,” the story says.
Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which has been ruling Turkey as a single-party government since 2002, has promoted the expansion of private health care facilities to improve access in the country of 85 million people. The case of the newborn deaths has put for-profit health care under the spotlight.
The government reimburses private hospitals that treat eligible patients when the public system is overwhelmed. The system is open to abuse, critics say.