In the City of Buenos Aires, a man from Villa Lugano lives around 70 years on average. One from Belgrano or Palermo, between 75 and 77 and a half. That is five to seven years of difference in the same city, half an hour apart by bus.
Between provinces, the gap widens. According to INDEC, in 2022 a man lived 76.6 years on average in the City of Buenos Aires and 68.9 in Chaco: almost eight fewer years for having been born somewhere else in the same country.
At the start of life, inequality is even clearer. In 2024, infant mortality was 14 per 1,000 live births in Corrientes and 4.9 in the City of Buenos Aires. That is almost three times the risk of dying before a first birthday.
And among women appears the figure that challenges me most. Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable deaths there is: we have a vaccine, screening and treatment. Yet in Formosa 17.3 women per 100,000 die of it, and in the City of Buenos Aires, 4.4. Almost four times more. The distance between our provinces is greater than the distance between Argentina and the most developed countries in the world.
None of this is biology. It is organization.
It is access, continuity of care, fragmented systems and opportunities distributed unequally. In Chicago, the axis of inequality is racial and urban. In Argentina it is territorial: the fracture between the north and the south of our cities, and between the centre and the north of our country.
The good news is that what was built socially can also be transformed. My whole career has been about that: turning what did not exist into something that does. I saw it in the prevention networks we built, in the laws we managed to push forward and in the programmes that reached places where nothing had reached before.
Prevention is probably the most efficient equity policy we have: it costs little and saves years of life.
Women’s health: the costliest problem no one wants to see. A trillion dollars, solid evidence and decades of documented neglect.