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Mexico Healthcare Transition Provides Model for US
Pretty much every other country in the world has settled on one model for everybody, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. We could solve a lot of problems in America by following this example.
Apr 19, 2026
In 2026, the US health care system is more costly, more unequal and more unstable than at any point in its history.
Last month, a survey released by the West Health-Gallup Center found that an estimated 28 million Americans (roughly 11%) had skipped meals to afford health care expenses in the last year. “Ambulance deserts” – where emergency services take over 25 minutes to arrive – are rapidly forming across the country, affecting millions of people. With the announcement last year of cuts to Medicaid and the federal government’s failure to extend ACA subsidies, the future looks especially bleak.
At the same time, we’ve seen huge increases in profits for insurance companies and hospitals. Greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits have brought American health care to the breaking point. This is a man-made natural disaster.
The US system is an outlier on the world stage in a number of important ways. For one, we’re the only developed country that doesn’t provide universal health care. Every one of our peer nations has some form of basic coverage for all citizens – the U.K., Canada, France, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia… We’re the only ones that decided to leave a significant percentage of the population (generally around 8%) without any coverage whatsoever.
American health care is also, by far, the most expensive in the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we have roughly twice the per-capita health care costs of other wealthy nations, yet some of the worst outcomes. We consistently under-perform in areas like life expectancy, infant mortality and deaths from treatable diseases.
According to a study conducted in 2020 by Yale epidemiologists for the medical journal The Lancet, a universal health care system in the US would prevent around 68,000 unnecessary deaths per year. These are people who die from preventable diseases, simply because they don’t have access to health insurance. If they lived in any other country in the developed world, they’d survive.
Mexico, another country where coverage has historically been less-than-total, announced last week that they will be implementing a universal health service designed to guarantee access to health care for the entire population. As Mexico moves forward with its initiative, it may provide a model for how the US can repair our dysfunctional, fragmented system. Mexico’s decree unifies three fragmented public systems (IMSS, ISSSTE, IMSS-Bienestar, taking a patchwork model and consolidating it into one program to prevent unnecessary duplication of costs. Hopefully, we can learn from both their successes and their mistakes.
America also has a patchwork model, combining elements of several different approaches to health care. For working people under 65, we have employer-provided private insurance. For veterans and military personnel, we have the V.A. (Veteran Affairs). For the over-65 population and people with certain disabilities, we have Medicare. For people below the poverty line, we have Medicaid. And for those without any health insurance at all, we have out-of-pocket payments. Pretty much every other country in the world has settled on one model for everybody, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. A unified system is the best tool for cost control. We could solve a lot of problems in America by following this example.
A majority of Americans favor a universal health care system. This would increase equality of access, bring down costs and help to resolve one of the greatest inequities in American life, something which separates us from the rest of the developed world and which has increasingly become unsustainable in recent years. If the status quo is maintained, health care costs will continue to rise, patients will continue to avoid care because they can’t afford it and for-profit companies will continue to find ways to pass the costs on to patients, even if it bankrupts or kills them.
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As Mexico Enacts Universal Healthcare, Advocate Says Insurers' 'Stranglehold' Is Moving US in 'Opposite Direction'
Medicare for All advocate Wendell Potter said it's "both inspiring and frustrating" to see other nations advance their public healthcare systems while the US dismantles its own.
Apr 10, 2026
As Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum moves forward with a plan to enact universal healthcare for her country’s more than 130 million people, a longtime advocate for Medicare for All in the US called the development “both inspiring and frustrating.”
"Inspiring because it shows what is possible," Wendell Potter, a former insurance company communications director who has become a leading critic of the industry, told Common Dreams. "Frustrating because here in the US we are going in the opposite direction."
Earlier this week, Sheinbaum announced a decree that she called "a historic step" for Mexico.
Beginning in 2027, her government plans to unify Mexico's public health institutions into a single Universal Health Service, allowing patients across the country to receive care from the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), the Social Security Institute and Social Services of Workers of the State (ISSSTE), and the IMSS‑Bienestar program, which provides free services to those without employer-provided insurance.
According to TeleSur, universal access would be rolled out gradually, with universal emergency care and continuity of treatment, free of financial constraints, beginning in January. Specialized services such as radiotherapy, laboratory tests, and imaging studies would be phased in later that year, and universal prescription fulfillment and hospitalization would also be added to the program in 2028.
"The goal is that when we leave the government [in 2030], any Mexican man or woman can go to any health institution for treatment for any ailment and be received," Sheinbaum said.
Mexico has expanded its annual healthcare budget in recent years, but Sheinbaum's government hopes that consolidating all of Mexico's health services into a single program will eliminate bureaucratic bloat and create a more cost-effective system that saves money over time.
Potter described the plan as “just another example of countries around the world lapping the US when it comes to healthcare policy.”
While tens of millions more previously uninsured Mexicans have become eligible for free care under the healthcare expansion efforts of Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the US under President Donald Trump is in the process of shredding public healthcare programs and subsidies.
Following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by Trump last year, 11.8 million Americans are expected to lose Medicaid and other coverage, and more than 20 million are projected to see higher premiums after insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act were allowed to expire.
"Due to the stranglehold Big Insurance has on too many politicians in this country, instead of expanding care and lowering costs, we are simply helping Big Insurance make more and more money," Potter said. "It is totally backwards."
"We must continue to keep Medicare for All as our north star here. But also acknowledge the reality that we need to change so much about our current political environment to make it possible," he said. "And that has to start with breaking up Big Insurance's stranglehold on Washington."
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Amid Threats of US Attack, Sheinbaum Tells Trump to Get a Grip on Illegal Guns, Drugs
“The cartels are fueled by the United States’ demand for drugs and armed with US weapons, and thanks to the United States, they are able to orchestrate enormous bloodshed and chaos," said Mexico's president.
Mar 09, 2026
Amid months of threats by US leaders to attack drug gangs in Mexico, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum slapped back Monday against President Donald Trump's assertion that her country is the "epicenter" of cartel violence by urging him to stem the flow of illegal arms across the border—and domestic demand for illicit narcotics.
“If the flow of illegal weapons from the United States into Mexico were stopped, these groups wouldn’t have access to this type of high-powered weaponry to carry out their criminal activities,” Sheinabum said during her daily press briefing, citing a 2025 US Department of Justice report showing that approximately 3 in 4 guns used by Mexican criminal organizations were illicitly trafficked across the international border.
“There’s a very important aspect that needs to be addressed, which is reducing drug use in the United States,” she added.
In a separate interview with W Radio, Sheinbaum took aim at Trump's Saturday speech at his so-called "Shield of the Americas" summit with mostly right-wing Latin American leaders, during which he called Mexico the "epicenter of cartel violence" and announced a "brand-new military coalition" to tackle drug gangs.
“The epicenter of cartel violence is not Mexico, it’s the United States,” she said. “The cartels are fueled by the United States’ demand for drugs and armed with US weapons, and thanks to the United States, they are able to orchestrate enormous bloodshed and chaos throughout Latin America.”
In the latest in a series of threats to attack criminal organizations in Mexico—a scenario vehemently opposed by the Mexican government and most Mexicans—Trump said Saturday that allied right-wing Latin American governments have made “a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks.”
Mexicans are wary of US interventions, having lost half their national territory to the United States in an 1846-48 war that two US presidents—Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant—said was waged under false pretext to conquer territory and expand slavery. The US also invaded and briefly occupied the port city of Veracruz in 1914 and launched a punitive invasion targeting the revolutionary Pancho Villa's forces in 1916-17.
Sheinbaum's remarks came after Mexican troops, supported by US intelligence, killed Jalisco New Generation Cartel chief Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes—known as “El Mencho”—during a raid last month. The operation sparked a wave of retaliatory cartel violence in some Mexican states.
Mexico has also arrested hundreds of suspected drug traffickers, destroyed numerous secret narcotics labs, and handed over dozens of alleged cartel criminals to US authorities in recent months.
Last year, the US Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against US gun manufacturers, unanimously ruling that Mexico did not plausibly show the companies aided and abetted illegal arms sales.
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