Women’s health and noncommunicable diseases are both generating increasing interest within the international community. Over the past two years major action platforms have been launched in these areas, including the United Nations’ Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health and...

Breast cancer is a major public health issue in low-income and middle-income countries. In Mexico, incidence and mortality of breast cancer have risen in the past few decades. Changes in health-care policies in Mexico have incorporated programmes for access to early diagnosis and treatment of...

To improve the performance of international health organisations, their essential functions must be agreed. This paper develops a framework to discuss these essential functions. Two groups are identified: core functions and supportive functions. Core functions transcend the sovereignty of any...

One of the challenges common to all social systems is to achieve fairness in the distribution of the financing burden, and protection from the risk of financial loss. For health systems, this goal is of particular importance and especially difficult to achieve due to the catastrophic and...

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...

Despite having achieved an average life expectancy of 75 years, much the same as that of more developed countries, Mexico entered the 21st century with a health system mared by its failure to offer financial protection in health to more than half of its citizens; this was both a result and a...

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...