We spent our entire day today looking at a hospital in the La Matanza municipality in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. While this hospital was public like the one we visited in San Isidro, the way it received its budget and funding was very different. With San Isidro, they were mostly funded through their municipality, a richer municipality at that. With La Matanza, it is completely funded by the province of Buenos Aires and receives no funding from the municipality of La Matanza. La Matanza is also a much lower income municipality/city compared to San Isidro, which makes the annual budgets that they received very different when compared to one another. The city is also just as populated as the city of Buenos Aires, yet it only has three public hospitals in the city compared to Buenos Aires’ several public hospitals to cover its population. We noticed a distinct lack of funding in La Matanza’s Paroissien Hospital when it came to their infrastructure and their technology. While showing us their equipment, they showed us an X-Ray machine they recently got that resembled one that we’ve had in the U.S. for at least a decade at this point. This lag in technological updates isn’t because Argentina themselves is significantly behind in medical technology but rather because hospitals such as Paroissien that rely solely on provincial funding do not typically have the budget for updates in technology as frequently as the market releases new products. They also mentioned a struggle with keeping doctors and nurses on staff since they are often less overworked and better payed in the private sector so they often lose personnel to the private sector, leading to constant understaffing and labor shortages, thus causing lower levels of care, which in turn could result in decreased funding from the province if they are not considered a high level hospital that is necessary to the municipality and province. Overall, it just seemed like being entirely provincially funded left La Matanza at the will of the government’s budget and funding whims whereas hospitals such as San Isidro that are more reliant on municipal funding have a bit more sway in what gets budgeted where and where the money gets moved and prioritized.