The Hospital Aleman is very good - my daughter used to belong to their plan. Then they started raising their rates, and she switched to the Italiano. She says both are about the same.
The reason I said OSDE was best is because A) It has a very large number of physicians in its rooster, and B) It is an "open" plan; that is, the patient chooses the hospital.
The Hospital Aleman and the Italiano are closed plans - they have clinics all over BA, but patients must go to the main hospital for surgery, etc.
Public hospitals are manned by excellent physicians, but the facilities are poor, with the exception of the Hosp. Fernandez and the Clinicas. However, often a public hospital's diagnosis is better because doctors can spend more time with each patient, and are free to request expensive tests that private medical plans would not authorize. My niece is a physical therapist; in the Hospital Durand she can work on a patient for forty-five minutes. In the private hospital she works, she can allot each patient seven minutes, and after that must move them to exercise machines or such.
A friend had a small breast lump, but her medical insurance's gynecologists kept dismissing it as nothing. She tried several different doctors in her plan, but they all said it was nothing. When the lump was the size of a tangerine they finally authorized a biopsy, and a mastectomy, but she was dead in less than a year. This would have never happened had she gone to a public hospital.
My father was a top-notch orthopaedic surgeon - all his life he worked at a public hospital in the morning, and at a private one in the afternoon. There are many doctors who still do that.
So, don't dismiss public hospitals - despite severe underfunding, they do a very good job at diagnosis and surgery.
