Today we started off at the Buenos Aires City Government building, where we had a lecture from Dr. Daniel Ferrante, who is the current Minister of health for CABA. Over the past few years, CABA has made a significant effort towards moving from hospitalization to primary care, influnced from Brazil. The main problem is that there is too many health care facilities in CABA. There is 5 times more bed than necessary which leaves old mental health facilites underused and mostly full with those with chronic conditions or the homeless. Unfortunatley there is no way to close theses hospitals as they are mainly owned by the unions and would cause to much political chaos. There is also a movement of people to CABA from the suburbs for healthcare. Their goal for next year is fix impatient facilities. Next we went to Austral University at the Buenos Aires City campus. Here we received a lecture from Dr. Gabriel Leverstein, who is the current director of Obras Social de Comercio. We learned that only 65% of people receive private coverage through either unions, PAMI or pre-paid insurance. The last lecture for the day was from Dr. Luis Gimenez, who works in the national minster of health. He taught us about a program that he implemented to put the funding of the hospitals and primary care units directly into their pockets instead of the ministries or providence. He was able to implement this in 20 providences in Argentina with all at different stages of the program. To end the day, we went to a museum of ethnography that explored the cultural aspect of indingeous people and other cultures around the world.
Our prompt for today is what is the PMO and how is this related to challenges faced by the leaders In Argentina, PMO stands for Programa Medico Obligatorio which means Mandatory Medical Program. It is the standard package of health services the government requires each insurance company to cover. This law was established to ensure a minimal level of healthcare for everyone. This system doesn’t have a maximum meaning there is no limit on the amount of care or services a person can receive. Unfortunately politicians use this as an advantage to gain favors. This year’s PMO is ozemspic, making the price of it tremendously increased. Each person has an insurance premium based off of their income. Often times the smaller the Obras Sociales have to cover the rest of the PMO since their members premiums don’t cover it.
