There is a figure I use often in conversations with decision-makers in Argentina, and it always produces the same effect: discomfort followed by silence. Here it is.
In the Universidad de San Andrés ESPOP survey of March 2026, Argentines’ main concerns are low wages (37%), unemployment (36%) and corruption (33%). Health appears in 12th place, named as the country’s main problem by just 3% and reaching 10% of total mentions.
Twelfth place.
Argentina has maternal mortality that in 2021 reached 74 per 100,000 live births, more than double the level of 2000. It has colorectal cancer screening coverage below 15% of the target population, while colorectal cancer is the country’s second-leading cause of cancer death. It has a drop in vaccination coverage that led to a 300% rise in whooping cough cases in 2025. And none of that data generates a political agenda, electoral traction or visible citizen demand.
Why this matters politically
Without citizen demand, there is no political supply
Electoral logic is relentless: politicians solve the problems that cost them votes. If health generates no political cost, there is no incentive to invest in it, to reform its architecture, or to build institutional capacity. It is administered, the status quo is maintained, announcements are made on the World Day of this or that disease, and life goes on.
This dynamic explains something observed systematically in Argentina: there is broad technical consensus on what must be done in health, more prevention, better coordination, sustainable financing, quality data, and total paralysis in implementation. Not because it is not known. But because doing it requires political capital no one wants to spend on an issue that does not pay at the ballot box.
The result is a health system that runs in permanent emergency: it reacts to outbreaks, manages crises, but does not build. It does not prevent. It does not anticipate. It does not reform.
The structural problem
Health is invisible until it explodes, and by then it is too late to prevent
Health policy has a problem of timing that makes it structurally disadvantaged in any competition for public attention: its costs are deferred and its benefits are invisible.
A vaccine that prevents a measles outbreak makes no headline. A measles outbreak that could have been prevented does, but the political cost falls on those who manage the crisis, not on those who decided not to invest in prevention five years earlier.
The colon cancer detected in time and resolved with surgery does not exist as a public story. Nor does the one that went undetected and killed someone at 52, because in Argentina we do not have cancer mortality registries processed and communicated at the speed the political debate requires.
This asymmetry of visibility is what allows health to degrade slowly, in silence, with no one held to account. The crisis does not look like a crisis. It looks like normality.
If there were a six-hour power blackout in Buenos Aires, it would be on the front page of every newspaper. The health system has gone years without real maintenance and it is not news. What does that say about what we choose to see?
My thesis
The problem is not that people don’t care, it’s that no one showed them the bill
I do not believe Argentines are indifferent to their health. I believe no one has presented the problem in a way that connects with their real concerns.
How does falling vaccination coverage feel to someone worried about insecurity and wages? It doesn’t. It is abstract. Until their child gets whooping cough and spends two weeks in intensive care.
Public health has a communication problem that is also a political problem: we communicate in the language of specialists to audiences who speak the language of everyday life. We talk about rates, about coverage, about DALYs. People talk about money, about time, about the fear of getting sick without being able to pay.
Building a health agenda requires translating the technical problem into everyday consequence. It requires showing that investment in prevention has a direct, measurable economic return. It requires building the demand that does not exist today, because if we wait for demand to arrive on its own, it will arrive when the system is already in open collapse.
I have spent 20 years doing this. The hardest part is not designing the policy. It is building the political will to implement it in a system that does not feel the cost of not acting.
Health carries no political cost in Argentina because its failures are invisible. Our job is to make them visible before they become irreversible.
The next article in this series: ‘The health system talks only to health ministers. And that is part of the problem.’