After a tango lesson to kick off the morning, we headed to the Universidad Nacional de La Matanza, where we visited the Paroissien Hospital. There, we learned more about Argentina’s public healthcare sector and saw how it operates in real time. The hospital serves around 12,000 patients each month and is located in La Matanza, a province with over two million residents who depend heavily on its services.

One of the biggest challenges the hospital faces is maintaining access to care beyond the initial visit. While treatment at the hospital is free through the public system, many patients struggle to continue care after being discharged due to a lack of follow-up resources. Unlike private hospitals, this provincial hospital doesn’t have a fixed operating budget. Instead, it relies entirely on government funding, which has been steadily declining. Although the hospital’s mission is to treat healthcare as a human right, limited funding reflects a gap between the hospital’s goals and government priorities. After the tour, we met with university students to learn about their nursing education and even got to try out their CPR training simulators. We finished the day with a discussion of the private sector, analyzing the differences between the private and public hospitals as well as the U.S. and Argentina’s healthcare system.

Federalism, a system where power is divided between national, provincial, and municipal governments, helps explain the differences between the two public hospitals we’ve visited. The hospital we saw today in La Matanza managed and funded at the provincial level, while San Isidro Hospital, which we visited earlier, is run at the municipal level and located in a wealthier area. Because municipalities in Argentina can retain and manage some of their tax revenue, wealthier areas like San Isidro are able to invest more in their hospitals, seen in the building’s condition and overall environment. However the provincial hospital in La Matanza, despite serving a larger and lower-income population, had broader services but operates with less funding per patient.