Executive summary Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Executive summary - Essay Example The People’s Insurance, known to the Mexicans as Seguro Popular, was a new public insurance scheme that assured legislated access to comprehensive health care by most of the citizens in Mexico including the ones in the rural areas. Concurrently, in 2009, the swine flu outbreak in Mexico came testing the country’s complex health system as thousands of apprehensive people poured into hospitals and clinics for diagnosis and care. Significantly, the health-care system in Mexico is a collage of developing and frequently confusing services as a hundred and five million people in the country continue to suffer from ailments of the developing world like tuberculosis and malaria, with other emerging maladies such as diabetes being listed by the World Health Organization as the leading cause of death in the country followed by liver and heart disease (Tracy 2011). More pressure prevailed as the influenza crisis caused by the H1N1 virus unfolded with the ill frequently visiting lo cal hospitals and clinics but one getting the facilities depended on a few factors i.e. where they lived, their employee and their total income. All the same, Mexicans have everything from a small private system to enormous global health insurance programs that comprise of private, public and employer funding; however, despite the selection of facilities, it is still an unequal system according to the Pan American Health Organization stating that since the different care providers get different levels of payment, they also provide different levels of care at various levels of quality (Sheila 2009). Extensively, even though public health care in Mexico has been rising, it still has the lowest per capita expenditures among the OECD countries having just a 6.6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) which worked out to be about 800 dollars per person in 2006 while Canada spent close to $3,700 per person which has duly increased to $5,000. Mexican private health system is structured in a way that about three million wealthy and middle class Mexicans, which includes the foreigners employed in Mexico, pay private insurers to gain access to high quality state of the art medical services and facilitates; on the other hand, most of the Mexicans insured through the public insurance system pay from their pockets to get better services through the private care (Tracy 2011). The private sector is booming with new clinics and specialized hospitals growing hastily in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and the most affected Monterrey that is becoming a major centre for medical tourism for the many Americans who are trying to escape their own expensive health care system. The Americans and other foreigners are gathering to the city’s growing number of glinting new hospitals to get services like obesity surgery, angioplasty, hip replacements etc; for instance, replacing a hip in the United States goes for about $43,000 to $63,000, but in Mexico one can bargain at around $12,000. The Mexican health system also has public