Expansion and Ineffectiveness: The Evolution of the Mexican Healthcare System

In the 1917 Mexican Constitution, Article 123 Section Number 14, health became an occupational right in which the employer paid for sickness and injuries, a right advocated in the Mexican Revolution. Despite this, it was not until 1943, with the creation of Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (Mexican Social Security Institute), that it became a reality. Following the creation of social security, other programs were established for federal workers (the Institute for Social Security and Services for State Workers), oil workers (Mexican Petroleum Company), and the armed forces (Ministry of National Defense and Secretariat of the Navy). Even then, the new healthcare system was not for everyone, generally leaving out informal laborers. There were varying degrees of quality and access to healthcare within subsystems. In 1983, a more meaningful attempt was made to include everyone and provide healthcare access for all Mexicans. A 1983 amendment to Article 4 of the Constitution added, Every person has the right to health protection. The law will define the ways and means for access to health services and will establish the concurrence of the Federation and the federated entities in matters of public health…” This led to subsequent healthcare reforms in the hope of a quality, equitable, and efficient universal health system in Mexico. The reforms attempted to unite and improve the health sectors, such as the Sistema Nacional de Salud (National Health System), the Programa de Reforma del Sector Salud (Health Sector Reform Program), and Seguro Popular (Popular Insurance), but many increased divisiveness and inequality. By piecing together this long history of reform, this paper analyzes the overall strategy and effectiveness of the Mexican Healthcare System, specifically focusing on the more contemporary reforms from 1983 to 2003, ultimately concluding that the Mexican healthcare system remains divided and inefficient

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7