Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum Is Moving to Make Healthcare Universal

Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum has signed a decree creating a Universal Health Service, designed to let any Mexican receive treatment at any public health institution, regardless of which scheme they are enrolled in. The goal? To smash a fragmented system where access has long depended less on medical need than on employment status, paperwork, and postcode.

Registration for a new health credential begins on 13 April, starting with those aged 85 and over. Cross-institutional access will roll out in phases from 1 January 2027, initially covering urgent and high-priority care: emergencies, high-risk pregnancies, heart attacks, strokes, and breast cancer diagnosis. The broader aim is to allow patients to use IMSS, ISSSTE, or IMSS-Bienestar facilities no matter their formal affiliation.

Sheinbaum is trying to turn healthcare rights on paper into real access

This matters because Mexico has split its public healthcare system into separate tracks: one for private-sector workers, one for state workers, and another for the uninsured. On paper, millions have coverage. In practice, institutions bounce patients around, deny treatment at the wrong facility, and push people into out-of-pocket costs when medicines or specialists are unavailable. Poorer and rural communities have borne the brunt of that dysfunction.

Sheinbaum calls the decree a historic step toward making healthcare a right in practice, not just on paper. The new credential will also function as an official ID, helping standardise access and referrals. A mobile app is planned for 2026, with digital credentials, appointment scheduling, and medical history to follow.

Of course, conservatives are already grumbling. They argue Mexico already had near-universal coverage and that the real problems are shortages, staffing gaps, bureaucracy, and uneven quality – not legal access. That criticism isn’t entirely wrong. Mexico’s system has faced repeated complaints about medicines and waits under multiple governments. But fragmentation itself has been a major barrier, and removing it is not nothing.

Sheinbaum is challenging neoliberal healthcare, while the real test still lies ahead

Market-minded critics always glide past that part. They’re comfortable describing public systems as broken but uncomfortable with governments trying to make them more universal and less dependent on ability to pay. The two-tier reality, private insurance filling the gaps left by an unequal public system, suits those who can afford to skip the queue. It’s much less convenient for everyone else.

This reform is part of a broader governing project. Since taking office in 2024, Sheinbaum has built on AMLO’s social agenda while deepening it, with pledges on housing, labour rights, wage growth, and even a reduced working week. She’s rejecting the old neoliberal sermon that any improvement for ordinary people must end in disaster.

None of this means the hard part is over. A decree doesn’t magically produce more doctors, medicine, beds, or scanners. If hospitals remain overstretched, the right on paper will still hit a wall of capacity. The real test will be in the rollout: registration working, institutions cooperating, and the 2027 phase improving care quickly enough for people to feel the difference.

Still, do not miss what makes this important. At a moment when Donald Trump is openly suggesting the federal government cannot properly care for people through programs like Medicaid and Medicare because it must focus on “military protection,” Mexico is moving in the opposite direction. Trump’s worldview treats healthcare as expendable when budgets tighten and war spending rises. Sheinbaum’s decree starts from a different premise: public care should follow the patient, not their insurance category or income. That is not radical in any moral sense. It is simply what healthcare looks like when a government puts human need ahead of austerity and militarism.