As Brazil approaches 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, the time when the country of the world succeeds at this bleak level after the United States, the public aptitude formula is suffering to care for those with it.
Launched in 1988, the so-called SUS, by the Saude Single System, or exclusive fitness formula, is based on the British National Health Service (NHS).
It was created when Brazil followed a new letter to remove it from its military dictatorship from 1964-1985.
The letter states that “health is a universal and state duty”.
THE SUS is one of the only systems in Latin America that offers universal coverage, i.e. loose fitness care for the entire population, at least in theory.
“On paper, the SUS is the best system. But we actually have a lot of problems,” said Fred Nicacio, an emergency physician in the city of Bauro in the southeast of the country.
“We want more hospital beds and a greater diversity of medicines,” he told the AFP.
Several of his companions were inflamed with the virus, leaving them out of service for two weeks, un-replaced.
“Frontline fitness care professionals are unmotivated, underpaid and undervalued,” he said.
He also noted that systemic corruption is the main problem.
“This means that political leaders divert the materials budget to patients who claim to be in poor health so they can get a medical certificate to work on,” he said.
Brazil has been shaken by pandemic scandals, adding cost overruns for purchases of emergency fans and cash hospitals that had been budgeted but never built.
Chronic state
But corruption alone, while a “serious problem,” is not the ruthless lack of resources for the public fitness system, said Guilherme Werneck, vice president of the Brazilian Association of Collective Health (ABRASCO).
“The letter says the state has a duty to ensure health care, but the INVESTMENT of the SUS is extremely, chronically inadequate,” he said.
A 2019 report through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that Brazil is among the countries that make the lowest public investment in physical care, which is consistent with a 30% below average of the emerging and evolving countries.
Brazil spends 4% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on public health, less than a portion of the point from countries such as Germany, France and Britain.
“Since the creation of the SUS 30 years ago, fitness has never been a strategic precedent on the national agenda,” said Luciana Dias Lima, a researcher at the Fiocruz Institute of Public Health.
The leadership of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro is “sufficiently compromised” in coordinating public fitness services, he said.
The virus highlights inequalities
Paradoxically, even when the federal government is accused of not insufficiently funding the public health care formula, it indirectly budgets the personal health care formula through tax exemptions for those who may have personal health insurance.
“No other country with a universal fitness formula budgets the sector this way,” Lima said.
“It is possible that this money is simply spent to fund the SUS,” said Werneck, who has a PhD in public health and epidemiology from Harvard.
More than 70% of Brazil’s 212 million people exclusively have the SUS.
His history was not intelligent in the pandemic: the recovery rate of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the personal formula is 50% higher than that of the public formula.
“The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities: the poorest are the most threatened because they live in insufficient health conditions, suffer from more chronic diseases and have more difficulty getting a hospital bed,” Werneck said.
“If the SUS had been funded, the reaction to COVID-19 would have been a lot ofArray,” he added.