Today was a jam packed day but it was so informative and cool to see. We started the day by driving to Pilar and seeing the Centro de Tomas Reggio which was a local clinic that supports its local neighborhood. This clinic provided general checkups and care for the local community publicly. They call this clinic preventative care, covering areas like dental hygiene, vaccines, general checkups, and gynecology. On occasion, specialists will drive up in mobile hospitals/vans to further assist the local community. These services are free to the community (accepting bonuses/initial inconsequential costs but the checkups for children and all the medicine are free) and funded by the local municipality. The people in this facility were extremely kind hearted, run by nuns and volunteers almost entirely. There were 3 paid staff members to keep this center operating but aside from that, all of the doctors and nurses within the building volunteer their time simply from the kindness and genuineness of their heart. They do this because the area/neighborhood that this clinic is located in is lower income and could use help in this area. Attached to this center, run by the same nuns, is a childcare center. This serves the same community that the clinic does, but instead of health care it provides childcare before school hours (typical school hours for the young age groups is 1pm-5pm).

After this adventure, we were able to head to the private university, Austral University, in Argentina. We had two business students who were able to give us a tour around the business school where we had lunch and presented some things that we learned from our morning at the clinic. It was very cool to see the contrasting lifestyles between US business students versus Argentina business students. It was cool to see the similarities as well. After this lunch we toured the nursing school that is connected to the private hospital of Austral University. This structure is similar to UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh. We also had two lectures, one on the Austral Hospital itself and the Insurance plan for Austral and how it is vertically integrated. I learned so much more about how insurance is structured and how that structure adjusts for private hospitals versus public. I also learned a lot about insurance coverage across union based plans, private plans, public plans, and the retirement plans. We then toured the Austral Hospital itself. Their main focus at Austral is really the patients as well as all of their staff. The work culture there is amazing and supportive which then bleeds into the quality of care that they give their patients.  It was so cool to see glimpses of a culture that truly holds true to the same values of love and support in this professional/work setting. We were able to contrast the differences in income levels from which healthcare provider you use mainly. Austral doesn’t accept other prepaid insurance, but other insurance companies can cover your visit to Austral. In other words, anyone can go to get care at Austral but you need to be able to cover the costs in some way. This is why the people of the community from the morning benefit greatly from the Centre de Tomas Reggio because they may not have the proper resources to go to a facility like Austral all the time. Both this public facility and private facility offer quality care to people, it just differs slightly in who receives their care more often.