Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum just hit rewind on a healthcare policy her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), scrapped in his austerity drive. This week, Sheinbaum announced plans to bring back Mexico’s old medicine purchasing model. The move comes after a brutal week for Mexico’s public hospitals. Major facilities from Oaxaca to Sonora cancelled surgeries because they ran out of medicine, water, food—even basic supplies. It’s a quiet admission from Sheinbaum that the system is buckling.

AMLO’s healthcare record was shaky while he was in office. Now it’s looking even worse. Remember when he said Mexico’s system was better than Denmark’s? It was dumb when he said it. It isn’t aging any better.

Take this: in early 2024, Animal Político reported AMLO’s government pulled MXN $57 billion from the fund for catastrophic illnesses—a 97% cut. That money was supposed to help Mexico’s poorest get life-saving treatments for cancer, birth defects, transplants, and more. In 2022, the fund didn’t pay for a single treatment it was meant to cover.

AMLO also dismantled Seguro Popular, a program that had problems but was more or less working, and replaced it with a universal system run out of Mexico’s welfare agency, the IMSS. He also shook up how the government bought medicines. AMLO expanded the list of approved suppliers from about 10 under Peña Nieto to over 300. His goal? Smash what he saw as an elite monopoly and in the process facilitate cheaper drug prices.

It flopped.

Medicine shortages started piling up late in his administration. By 2023, the government was scrambling to make emergency purchases worth hundreds of millions of pesos. They even set up a “mega pharmacy” to plug the gaps. And in a twist, AMLO’s administration ended up spending more on third-party private sub-contractors within the health service than his so-called neoliberal predecessors ever did.

Fast forward to now. Sheinbaum’s staring down a full-blown crisis. Medicine shortages have become catastrophic. Cancer patients, people with chronic illnesses—everyone’s feeling it. On top of that, hospitals are collapsing under the strain.

You wouldn’t know it from official statements, though. The government keeps downplaying the problem.

Take the Dr. Aurelio Valdivieso General Hospital in Oaxaca. This massive facility serves the entire state. Last week it ran out of medicine, supplies, water, and even food for staff, forcing the cancellation of all operations. The government called reports of the crisis “a lie.” But patients’ families, hospital staff, and even video evidence say otherwise. One video shows empty shelves and doctors appealing for help.

And that’s not all. Journalist have shared images from another Oaxaca hospital, this one stripped of supplies. In Puebla, Dr Adrian Rivas posted an official document showing Hospital General de Teziutlán ran out of food. In Sonora, medical staff at General Hospital published a letter pleading for intervention. 

The crisis is pushing more people toward private health insurance—if they can afford it. For the majority who can’t, the burden is falling on Mexico’s massive network of private pharmacies, playing out similarly to this scene at Farmacias Similares in Guaymas last week.

Sheinbaum’s decision to revert to Peña Nieto’s procurement model seems like her way of admitting things are bad. But she’s not owning that publicly. And it’s far from clear if her new approach will work, as due to the scheme’s redesign and delays in the process of implementing it, firms will have only one month to create and deliver the medicines to the health sector’s 360 warehouses. The process usually takes up to four months.

Dr Isaac Chávez Díaz, an anaesthesiologist in Sonora, has been documenting the system’s near collapse on X through first-hand reports and crowdsourcing. Posting on the social media network yesterday, he said, “Through budget cuts and poor management, they are achieving the neoliberal dream of privatizing everything.” 

It’s a grim irony. Morena campaigned on dismantling neoliberal policies. Instead, they’ve left Mexico’s public hospitals in a mess. This week’s announcement sees Sheinbaum attempting to undo the damage. But her attempted solution risks being as half-baked as AMLO’s previous reforms. The patients caught in the middle will be hoping it isn’t.