Time for the Buenos Aires City Government (a little bit of a rainy day but that didn’t stop us)! Immersed in the public sector regarding the healthcare city of Buenos Aires we got to hear from Dr. Daniel Ferrante. Current Deputy Minister of Health of CABA. From 2015 to 2019 the main themes were that they started implementing primary care, electronic records and focused on family care by taking the care from medical centers to the community. The city has ten old fashioned hospitals, one hundred hospitals, three million people who live in the area but around six hundred thousand without coverage. Every neighborhood has a primary care center but there is an excess in beds in the hospitals around the city creating tension with provinces. The amount of beds are underutilized but there is also not enough human resources in the public sector because pay is better in private. Right after we had a little break we got right into another lecture with Dr. Gabriel Leverstein, current director of the Obra Social de Comercio which is the largest union in Argentina. Hearing from him was quite insightful as we learned about HMO, PMO, inflation issues, the systems, social gradient and fragmented systems consisting of 400 different systems of healthcare. Soon we got a quick lunch and attended our last lecture of the day with Dr. Luis Gimenez, the past deputy national Minister of Health, at Austral. We discussed key problems in Argentina’s health system, Universal Health Coverage strategy implementation, outcomes and the financing model where 85% is funded by the national government but the remaining is by the provincial government. To end our day we took a tour of Museo Etnografico which is a museum of Ethnography that houses a rich collection of around 1,300 objects.
In all of the lectures though there was a lot of discussion about PMO, Programa Medico Obligatorio, which is Argentina’s medical program that sets the minimum healthcare services all Obras Sociales must provide. While meant to provide the basic minimum for care it presents a major challenge for Obras Sociales leaders due to high costs. Right now, the presence of Ozempic has led Obras Sociales to be forced to cover expensive treatments while battling inflation, rigid budgets and more. PMO has not defined an upper limit or max to what Obras Sociales must pay so they are simply running out of money trying to meet requirements they can’t properly fund. Today was filled with so much fascinating information about Argentina’s healthcare system, especially hearing from leaders in the system itself.
Fact of the day: The costume in the green room of the museum spoke to the danzantes that are a group of ten to twelve dancers dressed with costumes covered with silver plaques. Their dance was a featured act in the processions of Corpus Christi and of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the city of Sucre, in Bolivia.
