Agnet y judicialization en salud en Argentina

Abstract

Abstract: Argentina considers its first National HTA Agency (AGNET) amidst expectations that it would stop “the scourge of judicialization”. We suspect this argument is counterintuitive: the creation of HTA Agencies, or Health Benefits Packages in the Region, whatever their breadth, have so far failed to contain judicialisation by themselves. We discuss that judicialization thrives not only because of the laws of the land, but also because the design and creation of these technical Agencies, informing benefits lists, has been largely divorced from the more difficult task of seeking system-wide priority-setting (PS) processes and institutions, capable of eliciting the social values on which difficult coverage decisions should rest. We propose that, in order for explicit PS to gain a foothold in Argentina, a social “agreement on scarcity” has to be built first, consciously and openly, by (a) seeking more transparency in the way healthcare is financed across sub-sectors, with public access to auditable data; and (b) debating optimal levels of satisfaction of individual right to health, as rights of access, within the inevitable distributive conflict of a collective right to health and access, and never in isolation.