Double vulnerability, disease and work disability: this condition must be verified by medical experts in the Brazilian Social Security system among those applying for sick leave benefits. In a society organized around the production and consumption of goods, lack of income often means downward social class mobility and social deprivation. In the context of Social Security, medical activity is not focused on health restoration, treatment or prevention of disease. However, would be the lack of focus on health care assistance an argument strong enough to ignore the moral exam of this patient-physician interface? Thus, this paper argues that the expert medical activity over the entry or stay on sick leave benefits involves a specific type of risk arising from the singularity of the control task. This commitment to the patient, typical of medicine, is shifted due the need to control access to benefit. Between beneficence towards the plaintiff and the collective interest of preserving resources for strict observance of pension rules, there is a discretionary space filled by medical activity, the space venture, tensioning and sometimes of malfunctions. Medical expertise in recognizing incapacity to work is morally conflictive. The active reflection and fair judgment do not eliminate the moral conflict, but the conditions of its emergence become more obvious as well as the need to consider moral conflicts seriously when dealing with these control practices over the population.
bioethics; biopolitics; social security; moral conflict; forensic medicine; physician-patient relations