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Mexico making progress on universal health care system, president says

Universal health care is one of the cornerstone promises of Mexico’s president. And he says he’s making progress in bringing state leaders on board with a plan to federalize the system.

On Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised that Mexico will have one of the world’s best healthcare systems by the end of this year.

On Friday, he told reporters during his daily press conference that half of the country, including Sonora, has now signed on to a federalized health care system for private sector workers known as IMSS-Bienestar.

Since taking office, he has sought to centralize the former state-managed system and root out corruption. An institute set up in 2020 to tackle those issues couldn’t address shortages of medication and doctors and limited access to care. So earlier this year, it was consolidated into the IMSS-Bienestar program.

Kendal Blust was a senior field correspondent at KJZZ from 2018 to 2023.