Even though we are getting closer and closer to the end of our trip, that does not mean our activities throughout the day are slowing down. To begin with the day, we had a bus ride over to speak with Dra. Flor Ledesma, who is a part of the executives’ union in Buenos Aires. Medife is a special type of obras sociales that is only for those who are executives in the business world. This union uses the system of the 9% breakdown: 3% is contributed from the employee and 6% is contributed from the employer. Medife is a national prepaid medicine company with over 300,000 associates involved. Benefits including those such as outpatient, medical care, hospitalization, emergency care, medication, etc. are included in various types of insurance and benefit plans. The main idea of our meeting with Dra. Ledesma today was to understand the flow of money from the employee. What was really interesting to see was that Medife works as a union and also has insurance branches: Medife (I know, but do not get too confused just yet) and ASE. Medife union only owns one hospital, which was very intriguing when understanding how they are not in bankruptcy as a company and overall source for people. When learning about the flow of money in the system, it truly was confusing to wrap my head around as this company is vastly different from all other obras sociales we have spoken to before. From my understanding, money flows like a water stream. First, it must come from the (% from the employer and employee. Then, it flows to either insurance within the company, hospitals for coverage, other contracted insurance companies, and so forth. For private coverage, the money is either covering you in the insurance aspect or is already directly going to hospitals that will then cover you. As someone who is not business or good with math or money flow, it honestly was very hard to fully understand this flow, and it still is. After this meeting as well as a quick lunch break at IES, we then traveled to the Instituto Cardiovascular de Buenos Aires (ICBA) to tour and have a presentation about. By far, this has been one of the nicest hospitals I have ever visited. It was extremely interesting to learn more about the education system for those in medical school and nursing school as well as how ICBA is very prominent in discharging patients quickly. You would think since they are doing little to extreme work on the most important organ in your body that you would need to stay overnight a good amount of time, but the average patient stays about 2.5 days in ICBA. They have little to no issues with this system as well, which was very interesting and shocking to hear. Lastly, we then visited the Malba Museum. This short museum included pieces of modern art. Modern art is not something that I find myself to admire or be drawn to most, so I was glad to see it was not too long of an exhibit to end the day today. Can’t wait to see what we do these last four days. CHOW!