Welcome back!! We started our day with another lecture by the Minister of Health for the city of Buenos Aires. It was incredibly interesting to learn about how the different segments of healthcare work in the city of Buenos Aires from the head of city health. During our lecture, he talked about the 34 hospitals he is in charge of in Buenos Aires. Being in charge of this many hospitals comes with many challenges as there is never a way to estimate how many people are using the hospital since they can serve anyone. The hospitals in Buenos Aires deal with lots of leakage from the provinces surrounding the city since they are poorer and need access to the free public hospitals located in Buenos Aires. 

After our first lecture, we headed back over to Austral to have our second lecture of the day. This was with the current director of the largest union in Argentina called Obra Social de Comercio. During the lecture, he broke down exactly how insurance going through unions works. The health insurance of unions is financed through employees, employers, and out-of-pocket payments. The price of being part of the union healthcare was $5.70 a month but recently increased to $13.80 a month due to inflation, this will have complete coverage. The healthcare provided by the union is only for the person part of the union but will cover family members on need, so if a family member is sick you only pay insurance for them when they need coverage. Depending on the unions they will either provide insurance through hospitals that they own or they will have deals with private hospitals and your insurance will go through that private hospital. Going through unions you will get better care than a public hospital. In private hospitals, they perform 6-8 surgeries in a room per day while public hospitals only perform 0.9 surgeries in a room each day. 

To end the day we got to go on a walking/bus tour around 3 neighborhoods. We were able to learn more about the history and architecture of Argentina. At one of our stops were explored the markets and took many pictures of the colorful buildings. Unfortunately, the Messi statue that is normally in the window of one of the markets was gone because his head fell off! So instead there was a man dressed as Messi wanting to take pictures with us. Anyway, today was a pretty full and exciting day!