Ask someone why Turkey attracts so many foreign patients, and the first answer is almost always the same: because it's cheaper. I started from the same assumption myself. Then I checked, procedure by procedure, and found things aren't quite like that.
I compared three popular medical tourism procedures, gastric sleeve, dental implants, and hair transplants, using real prices, verified directly on clinic websites in both countries, not from press articles that repeat the same assumption without checking it.
For bariatric surgery, the all-inclusive price at a Turkish clinic usually ranges between 3,500 and 6,000 dollars, roughly 3,200 to 5,500 euros. At Spitalul Transilvania in Cluj, where I found one of the few openly displayed prices in the Romanian market, a gastric sleeve costs 3,500 euros. Practically identical to the lower end of the Turkish market.
For dental implants, the same picture repeats. In Turkey, prices start around 550 euros. In Romania, the clinics I checked in Bucharest and Cluj have prices between 500 and 900 euros, depending on implant quality. There's no meaningful difference.
For hair transplants, same story. Turkey offers FUE between 1,500 and 3,000 dollars, roughly 1,400 to 2,750 euros. In Romania, prices range between 1,500 and 4,700 euros, with one reference clinic starting as low as 1,590 euros. At the lower end of the range, prices are nearly identical.
What does this mean? That, at least for these three procedures, the myth of cheap Turkey doesn't survive direct verification. Romania only gets more expensive for complex cases, at the premium end, not for the standard offer most patients choose.
So why does everyone keep believing Turkey is much cheaper? Because the Turkish price is displayed systematically, across dozens of websites, easy to find and compare. The Romanian price, when it exists, appears in isolation, at a single clinic out of everything I checked, hidden on a website most international patients never even find.
The real difference isn't in cost. It's, once again, in visibility.