Interview: Fine gloss on U.S. health system totally lost in pandemic, says Turkish scholar

ISTANBUL, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) -- The COVID-19 pandemic has removed the U.S. makeup and polish on its health system, a Turkish scholar has said.

The wild capitalism in the United States has turned doctors into marketing specialists and hospitals into trading houses, said Baris Doster, an academic at the Istanbul-based Marmara University, in a recent interview with Xinhua, commenting on the U.S. government's failure to properly handle the pandemic.

"The pandemic revealed how unbearable the inequality of income distribution between classes is in this country," said Doster, who is also a veteran journalist and geo-strategist.

The health system in the world should be in favor of people, but the United States is in an exact opposite situation, the scholar said.

"The poorer U.S. citizens, such as Latin Americans, called Hispanics, and Africans, the dark-skinned people, emerged as the most disadvantaged in accessing health care," he said.

This showed "how bad the health system in the United States is, and how deep the gap between the rich and the poor is," he added.

With more than 92 million cases and some 1 million deaths, the United States is the country hardest hit by the pandemic, showed the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

According to various research, U.S. black, Latino and American Indian persons experienced higher rates of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death than white, non-Hispanic persons.

Although the virus is still spreading fast in the world, the United States has chosen to pursue economic interests at the cost of public health.

"In this context, there is no need for long words. The pandemic has removed the U.S. makeup and its polish on the health system, as it is the case in many other issues," he said.

When it comes to understanding these basic issues, there is no significant difference between Republicans and Democrats, said the scholar.

"The difference between Republicans and Democrats is like the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola, the two American beverages that taste almost the same," Doster said, adding successive U.S. governments have more or less been following the same policies.