Vol 22, 2013 Annals of Health Law 377
UNIVERSAL HEALTH COVERAGE IN MEXICO
government in the provision of health care, however, was very limited. Its
role in the health field was mostly concentrated in the development of
public health activities related to disease and environmental surveillance
and control.
A major step in the public provision of health care services was the
inauguration of Mexico’s General Hospital (Hospital General de Mexico) in
1905.20 According to Fernández del Castillo, the construction of this
modern public hospital represented an important symbolic leap of Mexican
medicine from the 18th to the 20th century, and a setback to the interest
groups within the government that supported the idea that state intervention
in health should be limited to the development of public health and
environmental activities.21
Thanks to the public health achievements of the early 20th century (the
control of bubonic plague, yellow fever and typhus) and the modernization
of clinical medicine, health was recognized as a specific field of
government intervention in 1917. That year the first two independent
public institutions devoted to health were created: the General Sanitary
Council (Consejo de Salubridad General), dependent on the Office of the
President of Mexico, and the Department of Public Health (Departamento
de Salubridad Pública), an administrative body of the executive power of
the federal government, responsible now for all public health activities
previously controlled by the Ministry of the Interior.22 The legal basis for
the creation of the General Sanitary Council, which had, among others, the
capacity to assume extraordinary powers in case of epidemics or natural
disasters, was Article 73 of the 1917 Constitution, the same provision
regulating the powers of Congress. Health was finally represented in
Mexico´s supreme law.
Equally important for the purpose of this paper was the introduction of
several labor rights in Article 123 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution.23
These rights, and those rights established in Articles 3 to 27, were the
clearest manifestation of the social conquests of the 1910 Mexican
Revolution and the first constitutional expression of social rights in
history.24 Those sections specifically related to the employer’s
20. Sociedad Médica del Hospital General AC, Historia del Hospital General, available
at http://www.smhg.org.mx/?q=es/node/15 (last visited Jan. 25, 2013).
21. See generally FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ DEL CASTILLO, EL HOSPITAL GENERAL DE
MÉXICO, ANTECEDENTES Y EVOLUCIÓN (Instituto para la Organización de Congresos
Médicos, Primer Congreso Mexicano de Medicina 1946).
22. MAURICIO ORTIZ, LA SALUD 41 (Nostra Ediciones 2010).
23. 1917 Constitution of Mexico, Art. 73 (Mex.) available at: http://www.latinamerican
studies.org/mexico/1917-Constitution.htm.
24. See Civil and Political Rights Definition, WIKIPEDIA.ORG, http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Civil_and_political_rights (last visited Jan. 25, 2013).
