What Argentina can teach U.S. healthcare leaders

Argentina is in the World Cup final on Sunday, and fans of Lionel Messi and his teammates will be deliriously happy if the team wins its second championship in a row.

But those good feelings — or the anguish if the team loses—won’t change the challenges facing the country’s healthcare system: fragmented multiplayer financing, a chronic disease transition, and aggressive fiscal restructuring in an economy that spent most of the past three years in crisis.

In March 2026, TPG International Health Academy brought sixteen senior U.S. healthcare executives to Buenos Aires to examine that question in a system that cannot afford the luxury of finding out slowly. Over five days, the delegation met with Argentina's minister of health and his cabinet, received a briefing from U.S. Embassy leadership, engaged Argentina's biotech sector, and conducted site visits at Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, Hospital Alemán and the CeSAC 15 primary care center in San Telmo. We arrived on March 24, the Día de la Memoria, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup, with marches underway across the city. It was an instructive backdrop for studying how institutions function when political and economic pressure is not abstract.

Argentina's structural challenge is a coordination problem as much as a resource problem. The country operates three parallel, largely uncoordinated subsystems: public, union-based social security (Obras Sociales), and private with more than 300 insurance funds and no meaningful coordination mechanisms across them. Wealthier provinces spend up to six times more per capita on healthcare than lower-resourced ones. Maternal mortality is eight times higher in poorer provinces. U.S. executives responsible for network integration and care coordination will recognize the dysfunction immediately, even if the architecture differs.

At Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires, we saw what two decades of investment produces when built without an assumption of abundant resources. The hospital operates a home-based care program serving 3,000 patients, uses longitudinal electronic health records built entirely in-house, and has deployed “Tana,” an AI clinical assistant that synthesizes structured and unstructured patient data to support clinician decision-making while preserving physician oversight. Hospital Italiano was the first institution in Argentina to achieve HIMSS EMRAM Level 7, the highest certification for electronic medical record adoption. That milestone was reached under sustained financial pressure. The technology is sophisticated. The operational discipline behind it is the transferable lesson.

Hospital Alemán, which is also in Buenos Aires, told a parallel story: AI deployed in radiology, operating room scheduling, and clinical documentation,without a national regulatory framework to guide it, under government-regulated premiums and continuously rising pharmaceutical costs. Both institutions are solving the same problems U.S. health systems face, often with fewer resources and more adaptive internal cultures.

The most important observation of the delegation had nothing to do with technology. CeSAC 15, a public primary care center in San Telmo, the oldest neighborhood in Buenos Aires. The center serves 70,000 residents through interdisciplinary teams — primary care, behavioral health, social work, pharmacy, and diagnostics — all under one roof, with each team accountable to a defined geographic population. Structurally, it reflects everything U.S. health systems have spent years trying to build.

What was harder to replicate was observable the moment we walked in: providers greeted patients by name, staff moved with visible engagement, and the facility functioned as a genuine community institution. Healthcare systems operate through technology and financing. They also operate through trust and trust is built differently than infrastructure.

Argentina is also a case study in what happens when reform moves faster than a system can absorb it. Significant budget reductions to public health programs produced measurable access gaps and communicable disease resurgence.

Pharmaceutical deregulation raised out-of-pocket costs for patients with no private alternative. By March 2026, macroeconomic stabilization was visible, inflation had dropped to approximately 31.5%, with 4% GDP growth projected. But the clinical consequences of earlier decisions were still working through the system. Costs removed from a budget line do not leave the system. They shift, and they compound.

Argentina's healthcare system is not a model for the United States to adopt. It is a functioning case study for questions U.S. healthcare is still working to answer about fragmentation, digital integration, primary care, and what reform costs when the margin for error is narrow.

The executives who engaged with it directly returned with a sharper understanding of those questions.

Perry Cohen, Pharm.D., is CEO of The Pharmacy Group and the TPG family of companies, including TPG International Health Academy, and a longtime member of the Managed Healthcare Executive editorial advisory board.