Over the course of the day, starting at 9 am and ending around 4 pm, we found ourselves moving quickly between conversations with current government officials, labor leaders, and a former Minister of Health. Each of these meetings offered us a different and unique window into Argentina’s public healthcare landscape. We ended the long day with a trip to a history museum called Museo Etnografico. During this museum tour we learned about each of the different exhibits and how they collaborate to emphasize Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk principle of the danger of a single story. Specific to Argentina, the museum houses artifacts that disprove the belief that Argentina’s people were poor prior to colonization and that the colonizers ‘saved’ them. Overall, this museum was a great way to end our day as we immersed ourselves in the history and culture surrounding hundreds of relics.
During our first meeting, at the Headquarters of the Ministry of Health, we met with Dr. Ferrante, a.k.a the Deputy Commissioner of the Ministry of Health. We discussed his role and responsibilities in Argentina’s healthcare system and got insight into the challenges the system faces. First, there are 5 times the number of beds in the public system of the city of Buenos Aires needed for the population size. The city would be able to save money by closing some of the hospitals that aren’t utilized, but unions keep these hospitals open to save the worker’s jobs. Secondly, people from outside the city often utilize the city’s public hospitals, however because they are outside of the municipality their taxes don’t fund these hospitals. This leads to major funding issues and a limited number of resources for each hospital.
In our second meeting at the University of Austral’s Buenos Aires campus, we met with Gabriel Leverstein who runs the largest union in Argentina and is also the president of all union bosses. He gave us a crash course in the issues related to insurance and healthcare coverage and the principles of the HMO, which is an umbrella term for all types of healthcare coverage such as prepaid private insurance, unions, and PAMI (Argentina’s version of medicaid). The main challenges in this branch of the healthcare system are funding issues related to people jumping from HMO to HMO. People can easily switch their way of healthcare coverage and typically will pay for a cheaper one when they are healthy and a more expensive one when they are sick to save money. This costs the unions tons of money as the amount they must pay for union healthcare insurance resides as a percentage of the patient’s salaries, which are typically low.
In our third meeting we met with the former Head of the National Ministry of Health from the 2017-2019 government, Dr. Gimenez. In this meeting we discussed the role of the National Ministry of Health in providing healthcare to the nation of Argentina. We learned that the national government allocates money to provinces if they follow obligations to provide certain healthcare services, and then it is up to the provincial governments to decide what to do with the money. In this meeting we learned about PMO, or the list of healthcare services and medications each healthcare coverage provider must cover made by the Ministry of Health. The issue with PMO is that politicians will use it to improve their campaign platform by getting certain medications/procedures added to the list. This forces healthcare coverage providers, such as Obras Sociales to be forced to pay for expensive medications/procedures. Due to the lack of a cap on the price of specific healthcare, currently an example would be Ozempic, Obras Sociales runs out of money to pay for these drugs/procedures because they are legally forced to provide patients with them.
Overall, today’s lecture was definitely heavy and certainly packed with a dense amount of information. I, as well as many other classmates, are certainly looking forward to a less packed schedule for tomorrow, Day 7!!
Pro Tip: Bring an umbrella! We unfortunately learned today that the skies of Argentina suddenly open in a matter of minutes and pour heavy and hard rain.
