We headed back to Austral’s downtown campus this morning for three more lectures today. Before walking over, Lauren and I went to a café around the corner for our hotel for a coffee, which wasn’t extraordinary. Today I consumed a lot of coffee!
Our first lecture of the day was about the ministry of health (MoH) . I love learning about the ministry of health because we don’t have anything like this in the United States. It operates as an intermediary almost, in between the national government and local governments. I found al ot of their roles to be quite a paradox because the MoH receives funds from the national government, and distributes resources to the provinces. However, they cannot control what the provinces do with the resources-meaning the provinces can sell them, or provide inaccurate data measurements for resources needed. There are no checks and balances in the system. This creates corruption. Our speaker was a previous director of a department, and honestly her job seemed so stressful and she oversaw basically her whole department and communication with all 24 provinces. This demonstrates that the national-state federalist relationship is fragmented and has organizational problems that are not monitored adequately. After this lecture I had another latte- which was so good!
Our second lecture was all about Social Health Insurance, where fragmentation and segmentation are common themes. He discussed the principle of solidarity, which is sharing risks to protect those who are vulnerable in society, and giving more responsibility on those who can bear it. This is important in healthcare because of weigh offs between “moral retreat” and profit. In Argentina, it seems like all officials are being indecisive about their future of healthcare which causes more problems because no one is making decisions.
We went to the cutest outdoor restaurant for lunch. It was so sunny and honestly pretty warm so I loved sitting outside. After this, we had time to discuss our final presentations in our groups.
All in all, today was a very interesting day and tonight we are going to a Tango show so I am SO excited. I cannot believe we only have two days left on the trip.
