One of the core aims of Mexico’s health sector reform in the two last administrations has been the extension of essential health services to the whole population. In order to reach that aim, concrete measures have been proposed within the National
Health Plans (Planes Nacionales de Salud).
Those measures aim at extending coverage in three distinct ways: (1) by incrementing the percentage of the population that receive the services; (2) by incrementing the number of services provided to the bulk of the population; and (3) by taking the services to geographic areas or groups that had no access to them (Gómez-Dantés et al. 2004; Nigenda et al. 2003; Ministry of Health 2001a, 2001b).