It’s day 2 in Buenos Aires! We had an early start to the day with a meeting time of 8am in the lobby to head to Sanatorio De Los Arcos a private hospital apart of the Swiss Medical Group. The agenda for the day included lectures from Dr. Gaberial Novick, former Deputy National Minister of Health, Dr. Luis Gimenez, a tour of the hospital from Dr. Jorge Lantos, and ended the day with a lecture from our very own Dr. Grant Martsolf.
In our first lecture Dr. Novick introduced an important metaphor to explain the healthcare system we will being learning about for the next two weeks. He compared the system to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For those of you who didn’t read the assigned books in high school, Frankenstein is about Victor Frankenstein who tries to create a “perfect specimen” through a science experiment. He creates the creature from old body parts, chemicals, and brings it to life with a mysterious spark. His creation turns out to not go as expected (shocking I know) and rejects him because of his hideous appearance and education level of a newborn, maybe a kindergartener if you want to be generous.
The Argentina healthcare system is like Frankenstein’s creation. They have the public system, private system, the obras sociales, and the National Ministry of Health. The public system is used by about 37% of the population. This is used by those who cannot afford private insurance/hospitals and those who are not apart of unions. The obras sociales is about 59% of the population. This sector is the unions workers who’s employer makes deals with insurance companies and pay for part of their premiums, about 3% is payed by the employers. The employee pays 6% for premiums. The private sectors is used about 4% of the population, but this number does not include the overlap from the obras sociale that use private companies for their insurance. The ministry ensures that healthcare system is complying with regulations, control private insurance available along with PAMI, a service for senior citizens comparable to United States Medicare, oversee composition of medical benefit program, PMO, and approve request from entities to be federal providers or insurances.
If you consider each sector of the system as body parts used to make the creature, you can see how they are just thrown together with no complete unity. This is how the healthcare system operates. With there being overlap in almost every sector this is a major lack in to no communication. It was thrown together and hoped it would work, just like Frankenstein did with his creation. There are ideas and movements being made to try and unite the systems to work together in a way that is the most efficient, but like Frankenstein, Argentina, at this time, is failing to get the coverage they want from universal healthcare.
Day 2 was a great way to start off our journey of learning about global health and the healthcare system here in Argentina. I can’t wait to update you all about more of what I learn! Hope to see you all tomorrow.