Thousands protest in Argentina over cuts to public health system

Thousands of people mobilized this Thursday (17) in Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, under the slogan “health cannot be touched” to demand better salaries for health workers.

With signs reading "Salary adjustment now" and "The hospital will not be touched," doctors, residents, nurses, and workers from other unions mobilized to protest what they consider a "systematic emptying" of public health as part of the drastic fiscal adjustment plan of Javier Milei's government.

"The current situation is critical," Ignacio Meza, a resident physician at the Fernández public hospital, told AFP during the mobilization. "We are facing a major attack by the national government on public health, with adjustments to health workers' salaries directly affecting the population's health."

The trigger for the march was the situation at the Garrahan public hospital, the country's main pediatric center, whose workers have been carrying out strikes and protests for months, denouncing "suffocating wages."

"There's a massive exodus of skilled human resources," Garrahan neonatologist Nicolás Morcillo told CNN Radio on Wednesday. "The hospital operates on a 2023 budget, and we don't know how we'll make it to the end of the year."

Meza pointed out that in his hospital there are “tired staff members and overworked shifts” since “more and more patients are going to the hospital due to a lack of medication, because they cannot get care at the centers that are part of their [private] health plan.”

While the protest was underway, Health Minister Mario Lugones denied on X that the Garrahan hospital was being defunded and stated that it was a reorganization to “end legal fraud and mismanagement.”

“We came to fix a system that was left broken,” he wrote.

tev/mr/lm/am