The health system in Argentina has been trapped by an economic crisis that impacts health care, both publicly and privately managed. A general decline that has dragged on for decades and that successive governments have not managed to remedy, in order to guarantee the population an irreplaceable right.
By the way, the shock is felt even more in these times of impetuous adjustments that have put millions of patients throughout the country in trouble, with particular repercussions on the universe of private providers, whose leaders warn about the possible bankruptcy of numerous healthcare centers suffocated by the crisis.
The rate zigzags within the framework of prepaid medicine and the economic collapse of clinics and sanatoriums, among a wide range of medical specialties, placed the private benefits scheme facing a collapse that national authorities should not ignore.
The problem is not minor at all and becomes relevant to the pace of monetary policies anchored more in fiscal indicators than in collective health, to name one deficiency among many others.
The outlook is uncertain and put the Argentine Health Union (UAS) on alert, which in a statement warned that more than 5,000 health establishments in the country are at serious risk of closure, as they are on the verge of bankruptcy. The entity groups together prepaid and the rest of the private system, which includes sanatoriums, clinics and laboratories, among others.
Such a figure is not to be taken lightly, but rather to admit the state of concern and take the pertinent measures without delay.
From UAS they affirm that the entire system, including providers and financiers, is going through a dramatic lack of financing as a consequence of erratic policies and regulations that, far from improving it, were plunging it into an unprecedented crisis, which brings it closer day by day to a scenario unsustainable. That is to say, the fall of the service is looming.
To this context, it should be added that many centers are plagued by possible executions by the Federal Administration of Public Revenues (Afip) as a result of pension and tax debts, to which are added the items referring to salaries and other impositions.
In relation to the province of Córdoba, the data are not auspicious: for the head of the Association of Private Hospital Clinics and Sanatoriums of Córdoba, Juan Grass, the health institutions have an “unpayable” debt with the Afip, which adds to increases in costs and inputs.
If a leader or executive recognizes that there are items “impossible to pay” and that a global improvement is not seen in the short term, it is the same as considering, as UAS points out, that the bankruptcy of a health center would trigger sooner rather than later. .
Key structural measures should not be delayed, since, as always happens (also in the public system), patients are in the middle, often immersed in the stridency of others.
