Health in Mexico (Essay Sample)

Team Report 6: Health In Mexico
The Mexican health care system is home to an open market of both public and private health care options. Universally funded, privately funded, employer-funded and government funded (state employee and military) programs are all part of the Central American country’s health care system.
Seguro Popular, Mexico’s first universal health coverage, began in 2004 with a mission to allot treatment to lower income families, having insured 50 million individuals since its conception (Internations, 2017). Important health indicators have since improved - particularly in rural Mexico - including a rise in screenings for cervical cancer and diabetes, treatments for children suffering from acute respiratory illnesses, vaccinations, and the number of women in prenatal care (Feldscher, 2012). But despite this milestone in health policy, much controversy remains regarding inequality in the system and a noticeable discrepancy between the quality of care provided by public programs relative to private ones.
As of 2016 Mexico spent 5.5 % of its overall GDP on health care spending (UNDP, 2019). According to a 2017 report by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the System for Social Protection in Health (SPSS), the Secretariat of Health, the State Health Services, and the IMSS Prospera program serve those not covered by social security, while the private sector provides services for the population that is able to pay. Mexico had the third lowest per capita expenditure on healthcare of all the countries in the OECD as of 2002, and the highest private out of pocket expenditure as of 2016 (OECD 2016). This may explain why Mexico has one of the largest health gaps in the world. An article by the research journal Health Affairs reported:
‘In Mexico, 52.9 percent of total health spending is spent out of pocket (for expenses not covered by insurance). This percentage is 16.6 percent in the United States … for persons at the top of the socioeconomic spectrum, Mexico’s multiple, parallel health care subsystems provide excellent care as assessed by any standard. But for those at the bottom of the distribution, the system provides little more than vaccination’ (Barraza-Llorens et Al.)
Moreover, the amount of health workers - particularly nurses - remains alarmingly low in Mexico with only 2.6 per 1000 inhabitants as of a 2013 study by the OECD. The study also reports that the workforce is unequally distributed: there are close to three times as many health care professionals in the Federal District as there are in other parts of the country. Hospitals fair no better: according to Perla Miranda for El Universal, there are insufficient amounts of beds for patients in general - a characteristic that does not shy away from the rampant inequality in the health system. ‘The doctors agreed’, she wrote ‘that it was very different to receive medical care in Mexico City, where there are 2.4 beds per every 1000 inhabitants, than in the state of Chiapas, where there is only one bed per every 2000 inhabitants.’
These factors indisputably contribute to the chance the Mexican population has a healthy life, with Mexico having one of the highest rates of infant mortality among OECD countries, a rampant obesity epidemic, and a difficulty at combating malaria and tuberculosis among its population. According to the most recent data published by The World Bank, the mortality rate in Mexico as of 2017 was 138.268 per 1,000 male adults, and 77.831 per 1,000 female adults.
According to the most recent Human Development Report published in 2019, the average life expectancy for the Mexican population is 75 years of age, where women live an average of 77.8 years, while men only 72.1 years of age, as of 2018. It is certainly a significant increase if compared to the year 1950, when the population lived 49.7 years (CIDICS, 2018). Moreover, it demonstrates the average life expectancy in Mexico has increased since the 1990s, when females were living for 74 years on average and men almost 69 years on average (IHME, 2017). However, the progress has slowed down since the early 2000s, and has been decreasing since 2017, when the average life expectancy of the Mexican population was 73 years (CIDICS, 2018). Currently, Mexico stands below the OECD average of 80.6 years of life expectancy, arguably due to having the second the highest rate of obesity (33% of adults), but also the highest overall share of population under obesity or overweight conditions among OECD countries (OECD, 2017). As a matter of fact, according to the World Health Organization, type 2 diabetes, also known as is responsible for the death of nearly 80,000 lives each year, representing a significant threat to the stability of the health public system in Mexico, since it is reported to be the leading cause of death in the country (Beaubien, 2018).
Moreover, in 2015 there were than more 655,000 deaths caused by cardiovascular diseases (25.5%), followed by endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic diseases (17.5%) as well as malignant tumors (13%), which were linked in the most part to diabetes mellitus (15%) and ischemic heart diseases (13.4%); other causes included liver diseases (5.4%), cerebrovascular diseases (5.2%), chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases (4%), hypertensive (3.5%), and aggressions (3.2%), totaling almost half of the total deaths reported (CIDICS, 2018). Also in 2015, 34,060 Mexicans between 15 to 29 years old died, representing 5.2% of the total amount of deaths (CIDICS, 2018). Most of the men within that age range died mainly because of aggressions (25.4%), followed by transportation accidents (17.8%), and intentional self-inflicted injuries, while in the case of women, 10.7% of them die due to transportation accidents, while 10.3% because of aggressions, followed by 7.4% due to international self-inflicted injuries (CIDICS, 2018).
Furthermore, it is concerning to realize there is a concentrated AIDS epidemic in Mexico, where most of the HIV infections are spread among determined groups of the population (PAHO, 2012). According to a report published by the Pan American Health Organization in 2012, there were about 61,000 people infected with HIV/AIDS in 1990, a figure that ultimately increased by more than 260% in the following two decades, totaling 220,000 people infected with HIV/AIDS in 2009. Moreover, more than half of those living with HIV were unaware of it, while the rest were either receiving antiretroviral therapy in a health facility or did not require it, according to 2009 data provided by the National Center for HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control (PAHO, 2012).
According to Dashboard 1 about the Quality of Human Development, the quality of health in a country is given by the percentage of lost health expectancy as well as the number of physicians and hospital beds per 10,000 people (UNDP, 2019). In Mexico, the lost