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President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum speaks during the daily morning briefing at Palacio Nacional on April 07, 2026 in Mexico City, Mexico.
(Photo by Jeannette Flores/ObturadorMX/Getty Images)
Mexico Healthcare Transition Provides Model for US
Pretty much every other country in the world has settled on one model for everybody, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. We could solve a lot of problems in America by following this example.
Apr 19, 2026
In 2026, the US health care system is more costly, more unequal and more unstable than at any point in its history.
Last month, a survey released by the West Health-Gallup Center found that an estimated 28 million Americans (roughly 11%) had skipped meals to afford health care expenses in the last year. “Ambulance deserts” – where emergency services take over 25 minutes to arrive – are rapidly forming across the country, affecting millions of people. With the announcement last year of cuts to Medicaid and the federal government’s failure to extend ACA subsidies, the future looks especially bleak.
At the same time, we’ve seen huge increases in profits for insurance companies and hospitals. Greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits have brought American health care to the breaking point. This is a man-made natural disaster.
The US system is an outlier on the world stage in a number of important ways. For one, we’re the only developed country that doesn’t provide universal health care. Every one of our peer nations has some form of basic coverage for all citizens – the U.K., Canada, France, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia… We’re the only ones that decided to leave a significant percentage of the population (generally around 8%) without any coverage whatsoever.
American health care is also, by far, the most expensive in the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we have roughly twice the per-capita health care costs of other wealthy nations, yet some of the worst outcomes. We consistently under-perform in areas like life expectancy, infant mortality and deaths from treatable diseases.
According to a study conducted in 2020 by Yale epidemiologists for the medical journal The Lancet, a universal health care system in the US would prevent around 68,000 unnecessary deaths per year. These are people who die from preventable diseases, simply because they don’t have access to health insurance. If they lived in any other country in the developed world, they’d survive.
Mexico, another country where coverage has historically been less-than-total, announced last week that they will be implementing a universal health service designed to guarantee access to health care for the entire population. As Mexico moves forward with its initiative, it may provide a model for how the US can repair our dysfunctional, fragmented system. Mexico’s decree unifies three fragmented public systems (IMSS, ISSSTE, IMSS-Bienestar, taking a patchwork model and consolidating it into one program to prevent unnecessary duplication of costs. Hopefully, we can learn from both their successes and their mistakes.
America also has a patchwork model, combining elements of several different approaches to health care. For working people under 65, we have employer-provided private insurance. For veterans and military personnel, we have the V.A. (Veteran Affairs). For the over-65 population and people with certain disabilities, we have Medicare. For people below the poverty line, we have Medicaid. And for those without any health insurance at all, we have out-of-pocket payments. Pretty much every other country in the world has settled on one model for everybody, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. A unified system is the best tool for cost control. We could solve a lot of problems in America by following this example.
A majority of Americans favor a universal health care system. This would increase equality of access, bring down costs and help to resolve one of the greatest inequities in American life, something which separates us from the rest of the developed world and which has increasingly become unsustainable in recent years. If the status quo is maintained, health care costs will continue to rise, patients will continue to avoid care because they can’t afford it and for-profit companies will continue to find ways to pass the costs on to patients, even if it bankrupts or kills them.
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Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
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Jackson Diianni
Jackson Diianni is a freelance writer who has published political essays in Salon.com, as well as cultural criticism in Passion of the Weiss and Culture Catch.
In 2026, the US health care system is more costly, more unequal and more unstable than at any point in its history.
Last month, a survey released by the West Health-Gallup Center found that an estimated 28 million Americans (roughly 11%) had skipped meals to afford health care expenses in the last year. “Ambulance deserts” – where emergency services take over 25 minutes to arrive – are rapidly forming across the country, affecting millions of people. With the announcement last year of cuts to Medicaid and the federal government’s failure to extend ACA subsidies, the future looks especially bleak.
At the same time, we’ve seen huge increases in profits for insurance companies and hospitals. Greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits have brought American health care to the breaking point. This is a man-made natural disaster.
The US system is an outlier on the world stage in a number of important ways. For one, we’re the only developed country that doesn’t provide universal health care. Every one of our peer nations has some form of basic coverage for all citizens – the U.K., Canada, France, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia… We’re the only ones that decided to leave a significant percentage of the population (generally around 8%) without any coverage whatsoever.
American health care is also, by far, the most expensive in the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we have roughly twice the per-capita health care costs of other wealthy nations, yet some of the worst outcomes. We consistently under-perform in areas like life expectancy, infant mortality and deaths from treatable diseases.
According to a study conducted in 2020 by Yale epidemiologists for the medical journal The Lancet, a universal health care system in the US would prevent around 68,000 unnecessary deaths per year. These are people who die from preventable diseases, simply because they don’t have access to health insurance. If they lived in any other country in the developed world, they’d survive.
Mexico, another country where coverage has historically been less-than-total, announced last week that they will be implementing a universal health service designed to guarantee access to health care for the entire population. As Mexico moves forward with its initiative, it may provide a model for how the US can repair our dysfunctional, fragmented system. Mexico’s decree unifies three fragmented public systems (IMSS, ISSSTE, IMSS-Bienestar, taking a patchwork model and consolidating it into one program to prevent unnecessary duplication of costs. Hopefully, we can learn from both their successes and their mistakes.
America also has a patchwork model, combining elements of several different approaches to health care. For working people under 65, we have employer-provided private insurance. For veterans and military personnel, we have the V.A. (Veteran Affairs). For the over-65 population and people with certain disabilities, we have Medicare. For people below the poverty line, we have Medicaid. And for those without any health insurance at all, we have out-of-pocket payments. Pretty much every other country in the world has settled on one model for everybody, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. A unified system is the best tool for cost control. We could solve a lot of problems in America by following this example.
A majority of Americans favor a universal health care system. This would increase equality of access, bring down costs and help to resolve one of the greatest inequities in American life, something which separates us from the rest of the developed world and which has increasingly become unsustainable in recent years. If the status quo is maintained, health care costs will continue to rise, patients will continue to avoid care because they can’t afford it and for-profit companies will continue to find ways to pass the costs on to patients, even if it bankrupts or kills them.
Jackson Diianni
Jackson Diianni is a freelance writer who has published political essays in Salon.com, as well as cultural criticism in Passion of the Weiss and Culture Catch.
In 2026, the US health care system is more costly, more unequal and more unstable than at any point in its history.
Last month, a survey released by the West Health-Gallup Center found that an estimated 28 million Americans (roughly 11%) had skipped meals to afford health care expenses in the last year. “Ambulance deserts” – where emergency services take over 25 minutes to arrive – are rapidly forming across the country, affecting millions of people. With the announcement last year of cuts to Medicaid and the federal government’s failure to extend ACA subsidies, the future looks especially bleak.
At the same time, we’ve seen huge increases in profits for insurance companies and hospitals. Greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits have brought American health care to the breaking point. This is a man-made natural disaster.
The US system is an outlier on the world stage in a number of important ways. For one, we’re the only developed country that doesn’t provide universal health care. Every one of our peer nations has some form of basic coverage for all citizens – the U.K., Canada, France, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia… We’re the only ones that decided to leave a significant percentage of the population (generally around 8%) without any coverage whatsoever.
American health care is also, by far, the most expensive in the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we have roughly twice the per-capita health care costs of other wealthy nations, yet some of the worst outcomes. We consistently under-perform in areas like life expectancy, infant mortality and deaths from treatable diseases.
According to a study conducted in 2020 by Yale epidemiologists for the medical journal The Lancet, a universal health care system in the US would prevent around 68,000 unnecessary deaths per year. These are people who die from preventable diseases, simply because they don’t have access to health insurance. If they lived in any other country in the developed world, they’d survive.
Mexico, another country where coverage has historically been less-than-total, announced last week that they will be implementing a universal health service designed to guarantee access to health care for the entire population. As Mexico moves forward with its initiative, it may provide a model for how the US can repair our dysfunctional, fragmented system. Mexico’s decree unifies three fragmented public systems (IMSS, ISSSTE, IMSS-Bienestar, taking a patchwork model and consolidating it into one program to prevent unnecessary duplication of costs. Hopefully, we can learn from both their successes and their mistakes.
America also has a patchwork model, combining elements of several different approaches to health care. For working people under 65, we have employer-provided private insurance. For veterans and military personnel, we have the V.A. (Veteran Affairs). For the over-65 population and people with certain disabilities, we have Medicare. For people below the poverty line, we have Medicaid. And for those without any health insurance at all, we have out-of-pocket payments. Pretty much every other country in the world has settled on one model for everybody, because it’s cheaper and less convoluted. A unified system is the best tool for cost control. We could solve a lot of problems in America by following this example.
A majority of Americans favor a universal health care system. This would increase equality of access, bring down costs and help to resolve one of the greatest inequities in American life, something which separates us from the rest of the developed world and which has increasingly become unsustainable in recent years. If the status quo is maintained, health care costs will continue to rise, patients will continue to avoid care because they can’t afford it and for-profit companies will continue to find ways to pass the costs on to patients, even if it bankrupts or kills them.
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