After visiting a rural hospital in Ario de Rosales, Michoacán on Saturday, President López Obrador said that his principal concerns are health and insecurity, and he is not worried about the economy because Mexico has a strong currency and there is less inflation.

He also said that ending corruption, which he thinks is the country’s most important problem, will be “easy.”

“The other things don’t worry me too much, corruption is easy to deal with,” he said. “The economy is growing, even if they say otherwise. The fact is that the peso has strengthened against the dollar more than any other currency in the world, and there’s less inflation now than before. Another fact is that the minimum wage has gone up for the first time in 36 years.”

With regard to health and insecurity, which he sees as the most troubling issues, López Obrador said the deployment of the National Guard, which started last week, will soon lead to a decline in crime rates, and that more doctors and healthcare personnel will be sent around the country to staff hospitals.

He added that he wants to use Coca-Cola’s distribution model to distribute medicines to the most remote parts of the country.

The president’s visit to the Ario de Rosales hospital was part of an ongoing tour of the seven rural hospitals run by the Mexican Social Security Institute in Michoacán. So far, López Obrador has visited 13 of the 80 rural hospitals across the country, and he plans to visit them all.

In Uruapan on Sunday, after completing his hospital visits, the president refused to comment on statements made by recently-departed finance secretary Carlos Urzúa in an interview with the magazine Proceso.

“I haven’t read [the interview],” the president told Excélsior. “I haven’t had time, because we’re working on reviving not just the medical system, which was in very bad shape, but we’re also lifting up the entire country, which was being ruled by corruption. That’s what we’re worried about.”

Source: El Universal (sp), Excélsior (sp)