Seguro Popular is a system aimed at establishing a universal health insurance program at Mexico for providing assistance to households incurring huge health care expenses and suffering to cope up with the sudden medical costs incurred by the family.
Reports state that this beneficial program has reached the poor successfully and reduced the health care expenditure for families who fall into the low-income strata. The plan caters to providing assistance for those diseases which incur huge medical expenses and provides health insurance packages which cover about 312 medications as well as around 266 health interventions.
The people who were part of a popular anti-poverty initiative called Oportunidades were entitled to this program automatically. This gave the people an opportunity to enrol in a beneficial medical insurance program free of cost and receive the required medical services and facilities.
The Seguro Popular initiative was successful in reducing huge out-of-pocket expenses for the poor individuals who could not afford expensive health care treatments. However, since this experiment was carried out for a short duration of 10 months, the assessment of this program and its success rate for longer durations needs to be ascertained. Rigorous research on the policies and comparison of similar programs established in other countries need to be conducted in order to improve the efficiency of the program
