Economic Shock Left Argentina’s Retirees Paying More for Essential Medicines

When Argentina’s government unleashed a sweeping package of shock economic policies in December 2023, the immediate focus was on exchange rates, inflation and fiscal balance. A new study now shows that the fallout reached directly into the medicine cabinets of the country’s poorest retirees. Researchers tracked nearly 10,000 specific commercial presentations of chronic outpatient medicines over almost five years and found that, even years after the shock, older adults living on the minimum pension were still paying a substantially larger share of their income for essential drugs than before the crisis. The findings, published in the International Journal for Equity in Health, offer one of the most granular quantitative portraits yet of how macroeconomic turbulence translates into reduced access to treatment.

The research team, led by Alejandro Macchia and Daniel Ferrante of Argentina’s Ministry of Health together with Gianni Tognoni of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Rome, assembled a balanced panel of 9,910 specific commercial presentations spanning June 2021 to March 2026. That panel yielded 584,690 presentation-month observations, an unusually rich dataset for a question that is usually addressed through surveys or anecdote. Rather than asking people whether they had skipped doses, the researchers measured affordability directly from prices: they calculated how much of a single minimum pension would be required to purchase thirty defined daily doses of medicines in eight major outpatient therapeutic families, from antihypertensives to antipsychotics.

The methodological backbone of the study is an interrupted time-series design, a technique that treats a policy change as a natural experiment by comparing trends before and after a known intervention date. Because the panel included fixed effects for each specific commercial presentation, the models could control for the fact that different products have different baseline prices and different trajectories. The team divided the observation window into three phases: a pre-shock period, an acute-shock period immediately following December 2023, and a post-shock period through March 2026. This structure allowed them to separate the abrupt discontinuity caused by the shock from the slower drift in affordability that was already underway.

That pre-existing drift matters. Between June 2021 and March 2026, the median cumulative price increase across the medicines studied was 1,951 percent. Cumulative inflation over the same period reached 2,191 percent, while the minimum pension rose by only 1,502 percent. Those three numbers tell the story in miniature: drug prices roughly kept pace with the general price level, but the income of the most vulnerable pensioners lagged far behind. In other words, even before the December 2023 shock, affordability was deteriorating across all eight therapeutic families, a slow erosion that the shock then dramatically accelerated.

The acute phase of the shock produced a sharp fall in purchasing power. Argentina’s December 2023 policy package included a steep devaluation of the peso, the removal of price controls and subsidies, and aggressive fiscal adjustment, all of which fed into a burst of inflation that outpaced the periodic adjustments to the minimum pension. For a retiree depending on that pension, the arithmetic is unforgiving: when prices jump faster than income, the quantity of medicine a monthly budget can buy shrinks. The interrupted time-series models captured this as a sudden break in the affordability series, superimposed on the already negative pre-shock trend.

What is most striking is what happened afterward. By March 2026, long after the initial turbulence, the affordability burden remained above the pre-shock average in every one of the eight therapeutic families examined. The excess burden was not evenly distributed. Antiparkinsonian medicines showed the largest persistent gap, with affordability 31.5 percent worse than the pre-shock average, a difference the authors report with a 95 percent confidence interval of 14.8 to 50.5 percent. Antithrombotic medicines, which prevent the clots that cause strokes and heart attacks, carried a 22.8 percent excess burden (95 percent CI, 15.9 to 30.0), and antipsychotic medicines a 20.2 percent excess burden (95 percent CI, 14.5 to 26.2).

The therapeutic profile of the hardest-hit categories is itself a warning. Parkinson’s disease, cardiovascular disease and severe mental illness are precisely the conditions in which uninterrupted treatment is critical and in which interruption carries immediate clinical consequences. A retiree who cannot afford an antithrombotic faces a quantifiable rise in stroke risk; a patient with psychosis who runs out of medication risks relapse and hospitalization. The study did not measure whether patients actually skipped doses, but the affordability metric it does measure, the fraction of a minimum pension consumed by a standard monthly supply, is a well-established proxy for the financial barrier to adherence, and it moved decisively in the wrong direction.

The authors frame Argentina as a model case for studying medication-affordability vulnerability under macroeconomic shock, and the framing has implications well beyond one country. In high-inflation settings, they note, formal medicine availability can coexist with declining affordability: pharmacies may be fully stocked, yet the drugs remain out of reach for those on fixed incomes. This distinction challenges a common assumption in pharmaceutical policy that supply-side indicators, such as stockouts and registration status, are sufficient measures of access. Argentina’s experience shows that a country can maintain nominal availability while the effective access of its poorest citizens quietly collapses.

The policy prescription that emerges from the analysis is the need for countercyclical mechanisms that protect the purchasing power of vulnerable populations during macroeconomic adjustment. Pension indexation that lags inflation, as Argentina’s did over this period, effectively transfers the cost of stabilization onto pensioners, and the medicine price data reveal exactly where that transfer lands. The authors argue that pharmaceutical policy should not be treated as a passive bystander to macroeconomic reform; targeted subsidies, differential price regulation for essential chronic medicines, or automatic affordability-linked adjustments could buffer the shock for those least able to absorb it. Without such mechanisms, they suggest, stabilization programs will continue to generate hidden health costs that surface later as untreated disease.

The study has limitations worth noting, and the authors are transparent about its scope. It used aggregated, publicly available data rather than individual patient records, so it measures affordability rather than actual consumption, and it did not require ethics approval because no human subjects were involved. The analysis received no specific funding from any public, commercial or not-for-profit agency, and the authors declare no competing interests. Yet the scale and granularity of the panel, nearly 585,000 observations across eight therapeutic families and almost five years, give the findings a robustness that few affordability studies achieve. As other economies confront their own inflationary shocks and adjustment programs, the Argentine case stands as a quantitative demonstration that the price of macroeconomic discipline is not always counted in currency markets. Sometimes it is counted in monthly pension fractions, one prescription at a time, among people who can least afford to pay.

Subject of Research: The impact of shock economic policies on the affordability of essential medicines for older adults in Argentina

Article Title: Effects of shock economic policies on access to essential medicines among older adults in Argentina: an interrupted time-series analysis (2021–2026)

Article References: Macchia, A., Tognoni, G., & Ferrante, D. (2026). Effects of shock economic policies on access to essential medicines among older adults in Argentina: an interrupted time-series analysis (2021–2026). International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03023-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03023-6

Keywords: Argentina, essential medicines, economic shock, drug affordability, older adults, minimum pension, inflation, interrupted time series, pharmaceutical policy, health equity, pharmacoeconomics, access to medicines