This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the consequences of the introduction of Seguro Popular, a program designed to provide affordable health services to almost 50 million people uninsured by Social Security in Mexico. The evidence so far shows that Seguro Popular has been a very effective tool in reducing catastrophic health expenditures for Mexican families. However, the literature has...

Suppose that each member of a set of agents has a preference list of a subset of houses, possibly involving ties, and each agent and house has their capacity denoting the maximum number of houses/agents (respectively) that can be matched to him/her/it. We want to find a matching M , called popular, for which there is no other matching M ′ such that more agents prefer M ′ to M than M to M ′, sub...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the effect of "Seguro Popular" (SP) on the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) and out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure in the medium term. MATERIAL AND METHODS We used the 'Encuesta de Evaluación del SP' --SP Survey Evaluation-- (2005-2008). We analyzed the SP effect on the rural cohort during two years of follow-up (2006 and 2008) and in the urban coho...

200 J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2012;38:200–201. doi:10.1136/jfprhc-2012-100399 First marriage The divorce of King Henry VIII from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, has, over the centuries, produced a positive paper storm of academic books and popular works, examination papers and essays. As a subject it has also inspired a number of films and TV documentaries. King Henry posed an argumen...

BACKGROUND We assessed aspects of Seguro Popular, a programme aimed to deliver health insurance, regular and preventive medical care, medicines, and health facilities to 50 million uninsured Mexicans. METHODS We randomly assigned treatment within 74 matched pairs of health clusters-ie, health facility catchment areas-representing 118 569 households in seven Mexican states, and measured outcom...

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How do you aggregate the preferences of multiple agents in a fair manner? This is a question that has occupied researchers for several centuries. Suppose we have k voters who each give their preferences on n candidates. How should the candidates be ranked to best represent the input? Marquis de Condorcet [5] showed that there may not exist a “winner”: a candidate who beats all other candidates ...