Preview: Cash Incentives for Healthy Families in Mexico

GLOBAL HEALTH -- December 29, 2009 at 4:39 PM EDT

Preview: Cash Incentives for Healthy Families in Mexico

Getting paid to keep your family healthy? That's the idea behind Mexico's innovative conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, which gives cash payouts to parents who take steps to keep themselves and their children well. The program is an effort to alleviate some of the effects of poverty and reduce severe health incidents down the line. The program also rewards education, allowing some families who would normally need extra income from another wage-earner to keep their children in school instead.

Ray Suarez reports from rural Morelos on how the program works, what critics say about its weaknesses and why it has become an important model in this global recession. Watch a preview below and check out photos from Suarez's trip at the NewsHour's Flickr page.

The PBS NewsHour welcomes your original comments. We reserve the right to remove posts that do not follow these basic guidelines: comments must be relevant to the topic of the post; may not include profanity, personal attacks or hate speech; may not promote a business or raise money; may not be spam. Anything you post should be your own work. The PBS NewsHour reserves the right to read on the air and/or publish on its Web site or in any medium now known or unknown the comments or e-mails that we receive. By submitting comments, you agree to the PBS Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, which include more details.