We come from a week where every day a new catastrophe was announced for the health system. We begin with the dissolution of the Remediar Plan: 8 thousand health units that had the provision of essential medicines assured are going to be orphaned.
The hypocrisy of Minister Mario Lugones, supported by President Javier Milei, tells us – through the addicted media – that the plan that included antibiotics, bronchodilators, medication for the most common pathologies, is going to be replaced by a limited first aid kit for cardiovascular diseases. Lies. Like the warehouses full of food for the dining rooms. Lies like the false x-rays on disability, like the alleged audits for waste in the university system, the gnocchi at Garrahan and the cave of activists at Posadas.
But something is changing.
Lies no longer work. Family debt grows incessantly. Ends are not made, businesses close, industries go bankrupt and only a handful of millionaires benefit from this policy against popular interests.
Let’s go back to health. The PAMI disaster was added to the dissolution of the Remediar Plan. Minister Caputo, to draw a lying surplus before his bosses at the Monetary Fund, withheld more than 500 billion pesos in payments to suppliers and reduced salaries for professionals. The strike by primary doctors and dentists (who now charge just 2,100 pesos per patient) brought to light a terminal crisis that wants to replace the system of increasing complexity with retirees who wander around sanatoriums begging for benefits, borrowing to buy medication or directly getting sick and dying without care.
No one believes the lies of the PAMI director about the benefits of the new capitated system. VLLC.
The third disaster was the new Mental Health Bill. Let’s summarize it like this: if you are depressed and you don’t have friends who will give you 150 thousand dollars to howl at the Movistar Arena; electroshock, straitjacket and madhouse.
The fourth disaster was denounced by the Argentine Society of Pediatrics: there are no vaccines, the districts are not being provided with vaccines from the mandatory national calendar. With unusual harshness, the scientific society warns about the serious health consequences that are already being expressed in the half-point increase in infant mortality after twenty years of decline.
This collapse sits as if in geological layers on top of other collapses. The sexual and reproductive health plan, where the distribution of condoms to jurisdictions during 2025 was zero. The dissolution of the direction of vaccine-preventable diseases in the face of the increase in syphilis and tuberculosis. The two hundred preventable deaths due to contaminated fentanyl and lack of provision of oncological medication by the former DADSE. The withdrawal of the World Health Organization, with its medium-term negative consequences on collective health.
And, finally, the perfect storm: the adjustment to the provinces that are in charge of 85% of public health care, with the complicity of the governors who transfer this adjustment downwards, lowering salaries, making working conditions precarious while they vote for the libertarian agenda in Congress and repress, as in Río Negro, those who dare to raise their voices.
Attempts to alleviate the effects of the collapse in friendly media sound ridiculous. A few days ago we learned about a 2026-2030 plan from the Ministry of Health, where it talks about the excellence of human capital, without answering any of the pressing questions that are hurting our health system today. And he does so with the arrogance of extending this alleged plan three years beyond the current presidential term. Quite a message.
Faced with this, the Argentine health field fights, even in a dispersed manner, in each jurisdiction, in each municipality, in each province. It is time to unify the demands. And as we did in 2025 in the Garrahan struggle, take to the streets en masse in unity to say enough is enough to the disaster, out with Lugones, out with the libertarian policy of public health, defense of free and quality health for all Argentines.
