We study the impact of economic crisis on health in Mexico. There have been four wide-scale economic crises in Mexico in the past two decades, the most recent in 1995-96. We find that mortality rates for the very young and the elderly increase or decline less rapidly in crisis years as compared...

Generating effective, fair, and sustainable financing is an important challenge facing modern health systems. In developing countries, financial protection for health tends to be segmented and fragmented. Access to insurance coverage is scarce and regressive. This lack of financial protection...

To assess the impact on fair health financing and household catastrophic health expenditures of the implementation of the Popular Health Insurance (Seguro Popular de Salud). Material and Methods. Data analyzed in this study come from the National Income and Expenditure Household Survey (Encuesta...

We studied the cost of health care for women with breast cancer treated at the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS, per its abbreviation in Spanish). Material and Methods: Using the Medical and Operative Information Systems of the IMSS, we constructed a cohort of patients diagnosed in 2002...

Compare patterns of catastrophic health expenditures in 12 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Material and Methods: Prevalence of catastrophic expenses was estimated uniformly at the household level using household surveys. Two types of prevalence indicators were used based on...

Absence of financial protection in health is a recently diagnosed “disease” of health systems. The most obvious symptom is that families face economic ruin and poverty as a consequence of financing their health care. Mexico was one of the first countries to diagnose the problem, attribute it...