The Legacy of President Lázaro Cárdenas for Health Care Reform in Today's Mexico.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's historic election victory in 2018 marked a sharp break from past decades of neoliberal socioeconomic policies. López Obrador campaigned on the promise of deep reform, with health care high on his agenda. The public health care sector had been decimated by decades of budget cuts, eroding workers' morale and patients' confidence, and crippling all aspects of the system. This article looks back to the creation of the nation's public health care system in the early twentieth century during the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). This "universal" system was designed to implement a central social justice goal of the Mexican Revolution of health care for all. The program rested on two pillars: providing care to the nation's vast, impoverished rural population and actively engaging communities in their own health care. Our objective is to critically assess the two presidents' health care initiatives within the distinct historical contexts of their administrations.

Health reform in Mexico: governance and potential outcomes.

Adopting key mechanisms to restructure public policy in developing countries is a crucial political task. The strengthening of infrastructure of health services, care quality, monitoring and population health; all might contribute to assuring the functionality of a national system for health monitoring and care. Over the last decades, the Mexican government has launched wide-ranging political reforms aiming to overcome socioeconomic and environmental problems, namely health, education, finances, energy and pension. The proposed (but yet not implemented) health reform in Mexico during E. Peña Nieto's administration (2012-2018) pretended an adjustment in Article 4 of the Mexican Constitution to compact medical care and reduce the State's responsibility to a provision of minimum health packages for the population. Here we use a simple analytical model to describe and interprete the concepts of context, process, actors and content and the outcome of three of the most important resulting components of this intended reform i.e. universality, basic packages, and 'outsourcing'. In light of the start of the Mexico's new federal administration, we argue that, if not properly defined by all actors, the implementation of such structural health reform in Mexico would precipitate a model of private/public association exacerbating a crisis of political representation, human rights, justice and governance.