Brazil suffers the consequences of the global economic crisis that is rooted in the financial capital. The solution implemented by the government, clearly hostage to the immediate interest of rentier capital and of market, destroys social rights and the achievements of the citizen Constitution. The reduction of public investment in social policies, the unemployment, and the high interest rates foreshadows the intensification of social inequalities that had been reduced in the country. This bitter and inefficient medicine compromises the fair and democratic development project.
The political groups representing the particularistic interests constraint the government and create a conjuncture of political crisis, magnified by the media, corroding public opinion and depoliticizing the population. The Rule of Law has been being violated and subtracted from its civilizing role and loses its characteristics inherent to contemporary democracies.
A cabinet shake-up is announced to discipline the groups that integrate, in thesis, the government base. Along with it, we are robbed of hope to advance towards the Brazil that the people bet on when electing Dilma Rousseff for her second term for the presidency of the country.
In this national context, the entities of the Health Reform Movement have been taking firm positioning in defense of the right to health and the Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde - known as SUS), attacked in its beginnings by successive omissions and political decisions of the National Congress and of the government, which destroys one of the greatest achievements of the Brazilian society since the re-democratization of the country, whose role, as public policy, is that of appeasing the consequences of the economic system that generates exclusion and social inequalities.
The periodic Saúde em Debate (Health in Debate Review), as an organ of divulgation of critical thinking in the field of collective health, transcribes, in this editorial, the manifest signed by the Centro Brasileiro de Estudos de Saúde - Cebes (Brazilian Center for Health Studies) and by the Associação Brasileira de Saúde Coletiva - Abrasco (Brazilian Association of Collective Health), supported by other entities of the struggle for health, explaining and denouncing the wiles of the current Brazilian political game, as a way of marking our position in the uncompromising defense of the SUS.
"The entities Cebes and Abrasco reaffirm the historical fight for democracy, development, and health, and express indignation and repudiation towards the govern initiative to transform health and the SUS in 'bargaining chip' in the perverse political game installed in the country. By putting the Ministry of Health available to the 'musical chairs' of ministries, in the attempt of a possible conciliation with the most retrograde sectors of the national politics in exchange for a momentary 'governance', Dilma's government submits to high-risk negotiation the courses of the right to health, of the SUS. Such attitude is unacceptable and means another defeat to the Health Reform Movement and the constitutional project for health.
We have always defended and fought for the universal right to health from a central place in the development project as well as for the public and universal character of the SUS as a State policy and, for that, the Ministry of Health holds a strategic role in the governments in the construction of social justice, of social rights, and of citizenship. That is why health can not serve as political currency as it does at this moment in which what is at stake is the governance of a coalition that is historically impracticable as well as the 2016 municipal elections. That agreement intensifies even more the conservative and physiologist wave in the country. It is noteworthy that at the time of the mensalão, health and public pension were also negotiated by the governance. Now, in the 'oil' crisis, history repeats itself once again, in the form of scam.
Thus, we vehemently repudiate that the management of the Ministry of Health is exercised by groups and managers who have never once shown effective commitment to the SUS - unified, universal, and with integrality - and that, on the contrary, compose the increasingly hegemonic forces of commercialization and financialization of the sector. That group articulated the approval of the entry of foreign capital, proposes the universalization of private health insurances and barred projects of public funding in health, has roots and political alliances with the private plans and insurance carriers, with the pharmaceutical industry and with the private health sector in Brazil.
It is a fact that that group already constraints governments and ministers, even the ones most progressive and ideologically aligned with the SUS project and the Health Reform project that, in some way, adhere or facilitate the spaces to the attainment of the respective interests. The question that arises is, what shall we expect from a minister with such origin and explicit commitment, financed by the health marked, defender of the privatist content of the well-known White Paper of the Associação Nacional de Hospitais Privados- ANAHP (National Association of Private Hospitals), and who doesn't commit to the public SUS as defined by the Constitution, in charge of the Ministry of Health?
Furthermore, that political group throughout its history has never offered the fidelity and coherence necessary to the government to get out of this grave political crisis built and expanded by themselves, coating in anti-democratic attitudes and 'cons' inside the institutionality. We understand the political moment as a fearful one, threatening not only the advances around the social policies and the SUS, but also democracy itself. Before this worrying scenario, it is fundamental that the Health Reform Movement, together with the other social, popular, political, and academic movements, radicalize its defense concerning the right to health as a main objective of the development, of the SUS that is universal, public, and of quality, and of the national democracy.
It is not about defending names, but uncompromisingly reaffirming the political project for health that Brazil has been building since the 1980's, sacramented in the Federal Constitution, and that is at risk, particularly in this complex scenario of contradictory forces and hegemonies. The militance of the Health Reform and of the SUS carry twenty-five years of woes with the successive disasters of underfunding coupled with the construction of another model of health care that is not universal, distant from the constitutional base of the rights to citizenship.
The SUS is currently going through an unprecedented funding crisis, generating a deficit of R$ 5,8 billion in 2015, and R$ 17 billion in 2016. At this moment when we are mobilized around the 15th National Health Conference, we reaffirm the necessity of a new source, one that is tied, sufficient, and stable. We claim for advances, building alternatives and strategies, and we can not passively watch this government decision, that can not, once more, betray the project of Health Reform.
The Cebes and the Abrasco firmly take position against such setbacks, and call upon the militants' reaction for the right to health to organize manifestations around the strengthening of the fight for the consolidation of a SUS that is public, universal, free, and of quality, built with broad popular participation and with social control, preserving the collective interests and the guarantee of effective advancements.
For the right to health, for a public, universal, and integral SUS, for the preservation of the Ministry of Health from the abominable political game. For Health, Democracy, respect, and preservation of the democratic institutions!".
Referência
- CENTRO BRASILEIRO DE ESTUDOS DE SAÚDE (CEBES). ASSOCIAÇÃO BRASILEIRA DE SAÚDE COLETIVA (ABRASCO). Dilma, preserve os interesses públicos na saúde! Saúde é Politica de Estado. 2015. Disponível em: <http://cebes.org.br/2015/09/dilma-preserve-os-interesses-publicos-na-saude-saude-e-politica-de-estado>. Acesso em: 7 out. 2015.
» http://cebes.org.br/2015/09/dilma-preserve-os-interesses-publicos-na-saude-saude-e-politica-de-estado
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jul-Sep 2015
