By KELIN DILLON

Despite ongoing efforts to resolve its ongoing drug shortage, the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) reported that it failed to fill 4,527,281 prescriptions for its beneficiaries in 2024. 

This prescription shortfall translates to 11,575,307 units of medication that were not provided from January 1 to December 19, 2024.

According to data from the Cero Desabasto, the IMSS stopped supplying over 5.18 million prescriptions in 2024  – similar to the 5.04 million unfilled in 2019, during the beginning stages of former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) administration. 

However, the medication shortage situation reached alarming levels during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a massive 50,403,787 prescriptions going unfilled from 2020 to 2022. The breakdown shows that in 2020, 15,857,785 prescriptions were unfilled, followed by 22,062,617 in 2021, and 12,483,385 in 2022. 

While the reduction to 4.5 million unfilled prescriptions in 2024 marks an improvement – the lowest figure in the past six years – it still represents a dramatic increase compared to pre-AMLO levels, when unfilled prescriptions were below 2 million. 

In the last two years of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency, unfilled prescriptions totaled 1,777,452 in 2017 and dropped to 1,468,217 in 2018.

Adding to the issue, the IMSS-Bienestar program, which took over responsibilities from the now-defunct Institute of Health for Welfare (Insabi), reported leaving 7,296 prescriptions unfilled in just under five months from August 1 to December 19, 2024. 

IMSS-Bienestar clarified that records of unfilled prescriptions were not maintained before August of that year. 

The ripple effects of the national medication shortage extend beyond the IMSS, impacting patients reliant on the Secretariat of Health (Ssa), IMSS, IMSS-Bienestar, and ISSSTE and causing protests to erupt among medical personnel due to the ongoing crisis.

Additionally, the Mexican Armed Forces have not been immune to the issue, with the Social Security Institute for the Mexican Armed Forces (ISSFAM) revealing it failed to fill 1,045,455 prescriptions from January 11 to November 30, 2024. While the lack of medications was cited as the cause, specific details regarding the quantity of drugs corresponding to the unfilled prescriptions remain undisclosed.

The Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) bore the brunt of this shortage, with 1,282 unfilled prescriptions, accounting for 32.89 percent of the total, while the Secretariat of the Navy (Semar) reported 45,455 unfilled prescriptions, about 4.6 percent of the overall shortage. 

Compounding these issues is a severe lack of medical personnel, leading 67 percent of military beneficiaries to wait four weeks or more for a medical appointment.

The crisis in the healthcare system is compounded by its financial constraints; in 2024, the Secretariat of Health’s budget was slashed from 96.989 billion pesos to 66.693 billion pesos, a cut of over 30 billion pesos that limited hospitals’ capacities to provide adequate care. 

Frida Romay, coordinator of the Zero Shortages collective, expressed deep concerns about the future, saying that, “The complaints I recorded in 2024 are triple what I documented in the previous year. If this trend continues, we can anticipate an even greater increase in unfilled prescriptions for 2025.”