Day 3 in Argentina! Today was another very long day and we traveled all over the city. I started off my morning with another hotel breakfast and we met in the lobby at 8:30am to drive to the Healthcare City of Buenos Aires. We met up with Dr. Daniel Ferrante, the Deputy Minister of Health of the city of Buenos Aires. He talked with us about the 34 public hospitals in BA, some of the challenges of this system, more about fragmentation, and the idea of a vertical integration chain in healthcare. After that we drove to Instituto Argentino de la Seguridad Social to talk with Dr. Luis Scervino. He is the current Director of the Obra Social de Obras Sanitarias and he taught us everything we needed to know about the Obras Sociales. We learned all about the social security part of Argentina, unions, insurance, PAMI (Argentina’s Medicare), and the history of social security in Argentina. After our lectures we ate lunch close by and then had a bus tour of some of Buenos Aires’ neighborhoods. We visited La Boca and another neighborhood. We shopped for gifts, went to an indoor market, and saw the President’s Pink House. It was a very long day filled with fun.
Dr. Scervino informed us on everything Obras Sociales, most importantly organized labor and laborers. This system has much cultural and political importance in Argentina. For starters, the cultural importance of obras sociales lies in the bond the unions create for workers. A cohort of laborers all with the same profession come together into one union to fight for their rights, discuss changes within their profession, and create a sense of community. Anyone who has a job and earns a paycheck is eligible to be in an Obra Social and there are 299 national ones, 24 provincial ones, 27 university ones, 1 army, and more. These Obras build the culture of loving your job and show how passionate workers are about what they do and they can easily call for change in such large groups.
In terms of political importance, Obras Sociales are such a fundamental part of Argentina’s healthcare. I see the political standpoint more in the fact of how they are funded and how they receive their rights. Obras Sociales are payed for by the workers, in their paychecks. So if you are in an Obra that historically has lower income jobs, your Obra will probably be “lesser quality”. This also goes the opposite way for people who earn more income are usually in “better quality” Obras. In order to has an even playing field between all the Obras there us a pooled fund to go to the lesser Obras. The other political side of Obras Sociales is how they are funded. Labor rights are not under the jurisdiction of the Obras, it is under the Ministerio de Trabajo. They are a government group who oversee all the Obras and create the laws to protect the unions and the workers in them.
The main takeaway I have from learning about Obras Sociales is that they are such a vital part of workers’ lives, but they also determine which hospitals workers can receive care from and how they get insurance. This is obviously extremely important and it is vital to learn how these Obras Sociales function all throughout Argentina.
