What is at stake in the
Government's fierce fight with Claudio Belocopitt
, owner of Swiss Medical, is how the cost of health is financed. President Javier Milei first thought that the best recipe was to free the
prices of
prepaid installments, which he reflected in DNU 70. Until he realized that there are companies, such as medicine, that do not operate with a logical market because many of its clients - such as retirees - are virtually captive.
The cost of a society's health has to do with one key factor:
how healthy or sick its citizens are
. The healthier people live and become old in that condition, the fewer services they will require from the health system and
its
costs
will be reduced
. It is, neither more nor less, than the famous and eternally ignored
preventive medicine
.
The best prescription for a medicine based on prevention begins with
food
. This week something happened that went almost unnoticed in the chaos of everyday life. The Argentine Society of Pediatrics (SAP) urged privately managed schools to ensure that the food they sell in their kiosks does not have black seals, that is, the
front labeling
used for foods with excess ingredients that make them not very nutritious and more harmful.
The general lack of a culture of
healthy eating
means that, even in the most affluent social classes, there is no consensus among the families of the students who go to these schools to put pressure on school kiosks to stop selling certain products or reduce them to a minimum. The bad news is that the food eaten from early childhood is key in the
prevention of overweight and obesity
, the "father and mother" of most non-communicable diseases.
People who eat poorly today will be
more likely to suffer more pathologies tomorrow
and will need the health system to a greater extent, which in part will increase the costs of private medicine and its need for redoubled financing. expense of those who pay the fees.
The Ministry of Health, headed by Mario Russo, should ensure
the
good balance of this medium and long-term equation.
Obviously, these issues go beyond the
accusations of "cartelization" of prepaid companies
that Justice will eventually have to resolve. What happens, beyond the current episode, is that if this trend continues, "the Belocopopitts" of the future - whether they are designated as massistas or not - will once again resign from their leadership positions in the sector due to disputes with future governments - whether libertarian or not. that the State does not encourage
healthy living and preventive medicine
.
Something curious happens, parenthetically, not only with the official promotion of a healthy life, but with the opposite gesture: advertising, which has swarmed in recent weeks in the media and social networks, which from a mostly state company
encourages the consumption
of food commonly called fast or "junk", without any health care provider batting an eyelid.
These are the gastronomic stores of YPF - whose 51 percent of the shares belong to the State -, from which an
aggressive campaign has been carried out with great discounts
on combos that include double hamburgers with fries and sugary drinks. In the offers available in the almost a thousand stores distributed in the country, there are also benefits in the purchase of all types of sweets and snacks
populated with black seals
.
When the new Government took office, one of the major pending issues was the
health financing crisis
. It is proven that, based on the wave of appeals for protection in Justice against prepaid payments, to which the Executive itself has now announced that it will join, the release of the fees was not the most effective resource. As when we came from Spain, there is still a lack of ideas, coherence and political will to make medicine in Argentina
sustainable
again .
P.S.