The Unified Health System (SUS) and the private assistance sector: interpretations and facts

Abstract

The essay discusses problems to reflect on, identify contradictions, as well as discern and formulate  political strategies on the privatization of the health  system in Brazil, especially the multiple meanings of  the Unified Health System (SUS) and about what is  public and what is private. It is observed that the  relations between public and private seized only by  measures (quantity of units, activities and human and  financial resources) are underlying interests and negotiations between agents and their political  decisions and difficulties to discern the structural features of an unequal health system and segmented  from the political conjunctures that reproduce them.  Thirty years after the 1988 Constitution, there have  been advances, impasses and setbacks, as well as  adjustments in the understanding of the SUS and the  private sector.