Mexico’s Servicio Universal de Salud: a pathway to integration and universal health coverage?

Mexico’s decreed Universal Health Service (Servicio Universal de Salud [SUS]), published on April 17, 2026, is ambitious in scope and pragmatic in design. This service creates a mandatory mechanism of operational coordination among federal public health-care providers. Its instruments––service exchange, interinstitutional financial compensation, health credentials linked to the national identity code, and electronic clinical records––seek to make access portable across public institutions, with the ultimate purposes of integrating the fragmented health system and providing universal health care.