Overview

Key points

• Mexico’s health system covers most of the population, yet it is segmented and inequitable, with diverse funding sources and provider agencies across federal, state and municipal levels, alongside private insurance and health care providers.
• Despite health insurance covering about half of the population, frequent job changes cause around 38% of those with insurance to lose access to care every year.
• Public spending on health became more equitable across the insured and the non-insured in the last two decades. However, the expenditure gap between these two groups is likely to increase in 2025 as part of government deficit reduction efforts.
• Private providers deliver about half of the outpatient care, but they are poorly regulated and excluded from public funding or provider networks.
• Health care providers struggle to improve care quality due to fragmented health services and coordination challenges.
• Mexico’s health system has comparatively few hospital beds, physicians and nurses and there are substantial geographical disparities between urban and rural areas.
• Access barriers include long waiting times, financial barriers, geographical imbalances and shortages of health care professionals, particularly for marginalized populations.
• There are ongoing efforts to address these challenges, such as programmes to incentivize health care professionals to work in underserved areas and expand primary care services in rural areas.
• Mexico’s life expectancy at birth was 75.2 years in 2021, lower than the OECD average (80.4 years). The primary causes of death are noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), mainly ischaemic heart disease, diabetes, stroke and renal disease.
• Premature mortality rates in Mexico are much higher than in other Latin American countries, the USA and Canada, with kidney disease rates up to 12 times higher.