Reimagining Private Health Insurance in Argentina
What if private health insurance in Argentina is broken on purpose? ReSalud is a blueprint for a buildable digital insurer: regulated infrastructure with a product surface, an operating model, and unit economics that work!
Argentina’s private health insurance system fails in ways that are too consistent to be accidental. Clinicians are paid months late. Treatment approvals are opaque and slow. Invoice requirements change without notice. Members pay premiums and still face unpredictable out-of-pocket costs. ReSalud starts from the premise that these behaviours persist because they are economically useful: they shift inflation risk, working-capital risk, and administrative burden away from insurers and onto healthcare professionals and families.
ReSalud is fundamentally infrastructure disguised as a health insurer. The UX is not the hard part. The hard part is the regulated workflow engine underneath: eligibility and enrolment, approvals, claims ingestion, reimbursement logic, provider payouts, audit trails, and exception handling in a high-inflation environment.
ReSalud is a mobile-first private health insurer designed for Argentina’s regulatory and economic reality, not a marketplace or a broker layered on top of incumbents. It starts with independent child mental-health professionals, because they are among the most systematically harmed by excessive paperwork and payment delays, and strategically important because treating one child often brings an entire, relatively healthy household into coverage.
I approached this the way I would inside a company: start from the incentives and constraints, validate them through field work, model the economics, define regulatory and capital boundaries, and only then design the product. It is the result of a year-long, solo research effort conducted alongside full-time work, out of curiosity rather than necessity. The goal was not to produce a deck, but to test whether the system could be made to work end to end. I spoke with dozens of clinicians and families in the field across Argentina and traced their day-to-day pain back to how insurers actually operate.
This is not an idea deck. The dossier combines primary and secondary research, competitive analysis, regulatory constraints, a concrete business model, a focused MVP specification spanning enrolment, approvals, reimbursements, and reporting, and a focused, five-year roadmap. It also includes valuation scenarios and potential acquisition targets to bootstrap the service under different initial funding constraints. The unit economics are very favourable: the LTV/CAC ratio sits around 4.7–4.8 and remains above 3.5 even under materially worse macroeconomic conditions. At 5% market share, the service obtainable market reaches $106 million in annual premiums by 2030, implying 50,000–100,000 members.
The product is also designed throughout. The dossier includes concrete flows and mock-ups showing how incentives translate into day-to-day use for both professionals and members.
The core hypotheses are explicit and falsifiable; the first validation pass is intentionally cheap. A basic landing page and a modest survey budget are sufficient to test demand, switching friction, and the provider-led acquisition channel.
ReSalud is not a slightly better insurer. It is neither a growth experiment that ignores regulation nor a thin digital layer on top of the same extractive mechanics. It is written to be implemented and it is written on the assumption that incumbents will not adopt it, because doing so would dismantle how they make money.
What the dossier describes is product infrastructure, by which I do not mean cloud architecture or internal tooling. I mean the machinery that makes a product’s promises hold at scale. In regulated or financial products, this layer is the product. The interface is the surface where the promise is made; product infrastructure is what prevents it from becoming a broken promise. It must be designed and prioritized like any other deliverable.
📄 Download the full ReSalud dossier (PDF).
If you are building systems where regulation, incentives, and operations actually matter, I am open to a conversation. Comments, critiques, and counterexamples are welcome, too. My contact details at the very bottom.