Commercialization emerges as a forceful driver of change in health care systems all around the world. Reforms, which have often been described in terms of an ‘epidemic’, involved a profound transformation of the role of the state in the financing, provision and regulation of healthcare services. This paper focuses on the most recent reform attempt in Turkey, ‘Transformation in Health’ program, which aims to carry out a fundamental transformation of the health sector. It examines to what extent the reform program adopts the market logic and applies it to more and more areas of health services. Starting with the debates regarding the nature of health care as a commodity, the paper demonstrates how different aspects of health care, from primary care services to acute hospital care, will increasingly be provided by a complex web of contracts, creating new modes of regulation. Furthermore, different policies listed in the reform program, such as the introduction of the purchaser-provider split, hospital autonomization and reorganization of the primary care, contain a whole new set of expectations with respect to provider behavior. The paper discusses the implications of all these policies in terms of the changes in the value systems, public perceptions and incentive structures of the patients as well as the providers. Also taking into consideration the similar reform attempts in other countries, it argues that these policies represent important changes in the boundaries between the public and the private and entail transfer of responsibilities from the state to the markets and family, and to higher and/or lower levels of policymaking. Yet, in the Turkish case it is too early to reach a conclusion about the direction of change. While in the provision of care the state seems to be withdrawing, in the financing of the services the picture is not clear: the reforms may lead to a greater role for public sector financing, which is essential to keep the governing Justice and Development Party’s promise of universalizing access to health care, or to governmental downsizing and privatization or a combination of both, that is universalizing access with a strong trend towards commercialization.