Concepts and ideas concerning universal health care: results of the intergovernmental arrangement in Greater Metropolitan Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 2003 to 2011

In the context of a federal and highly fragmented institutional framework like that Argentina, the article analyzes the concepts and ideas on which government actors organize their health policy instruments at three different levels of government. Based on this focus, the article investigates the convergences, divergences, and tensions permeating the exercising of the right to health. The analysis is organized in three dimensions of universal care that became challenges for the national policy during the period in question: ease of access to services, insured coverage, and a guaranteed set of explicit benefits for the entire population. Concerning these challenges, the actors deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of the policies for universal health care, based on the issues on their agendas, the ideas existing prior to the programs (and based on which the changes are conceived), and the political logic by which their decisions are made. This perspective seeks to transcend the programs’ underlying technical ideas in order to capture the political dimension of their implementation, seen as a complex social construction, which also faces structural problems that are part of the agenda at each level of government in relation to health services provision.

Keywords:
Health Policy; Universal Access to Health Care Services; Federalism