Upcoming election could rekindle health debate in Brazil

Abstract

In June, 2013, more than 1 million Brazilians in cities throughout the country staged mass protests. Although initially sparked by a rise in public transport costs, the street demonstrations evolved into mass protests against excessive govern ment spending on the World Cup soccer tournament and against insuffi cient public spending on essential services, in particular, health and education. The lack of mass protests during this year’s World Cup were probably the result of soccer fever having distracted the public and the government having flooded public areas with police and the military. But upcoming national elections on Oct 5, in which President Dilma Rousseff will run for a second term, could rekindle the debate about government spending on health and education, health experts said. “The mass protests were a public outcry against misplaced government spending priorities and could resume”, said Luis Fernando Correia, who was the head of emergency services at the Hospital Samaritano, a private Rio de Janeiro hospital, for 17 years. “They sent the message that Brazilians are fed up with inadequate government spending on public health services, negligence which has resulted in the limited access to them and the poor quality of them here.” A February, 2014, survey, taken by DataFolha, a private polling agency, supported Correia’s contention. In it, 45% of those surveyed said that “health” was the country’s main problem. Some 45% of those surveyed blamed poor health care on too few doctors and nurses and 23% blamed it on insuffi cient fi nancial resources. The federal government’s 2014 public health budget was 90 billion reais (US$40·6 billion), a mere 3·5% of the federal budget. But Brazil’s Health Minister Arthur Chioro defended that budget by saying that “federal spending on public health has been steadily increasing on both an annual and a percapita basis”. Per-person public health spending increased by 188% in the past decade, according to ministry fi gures.