OBJECTIVES: Cuadro Básico is a list of minimum medicines needed for a basic health care system, listing the most efficacious, safety and cost-effective medicines for priority conditions. The importance is to ensure availability of drugs for current and future public health relevant diseases. The objective is to describe the characteristics of National List in Mexico and compare it with the Instituto Mexicano Seguro Social (IMSS) List in order to hypothesize the relevance of the drugs included on both Lists versus current and future health needs in the country. METHODS: It was performed a descriptive analysis of the two lists organized by therapeutic area. The description includes number of total codes, and number per therapeutic area. The information was compared to find the gaps on the number of codes between the two Lists. In addition it was identified the top health priorities and prevalence. RESULTS: National list has 1631 codes; the therapeutic areas with the majority of codes are infectious diseases (222) and Oncology (150). IMSS List has 1145 codes. The biggest relative difference between the two lists come from codes available for neurology, dermatology and ophthalmology; 57%, 56% and 45% codes are not available at IMSS, respectively.  The top mortality causes in Mexico are heart disease, diabetes, cancer, accidents, liver diseases, stroke and COPD. If the analysis is made by disease, it worth mention that COPD only have 3 codes at IMSS and 7 codes at National Listing, while Alzheimer disease do not have any code at IMSS. CONCLUSIONS: A more extensive analysis (already available) brings information about the gaps between health needs and the drugs available. Mexico has an increased number of an aging population, which requires access to different drugs. The Essential list of WHO has 315 compounds versus Mexican which has 1631 codes. Is it a good guideline for decision makers?