THE JUDICIALIZATION OF HEALTH IN MACEIÓ AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE MUNICIPAL HEALTH FUND AND HEALTH SERVICES
The counter-reforms implemented in Brazil from the second half of the 1990s onwards are an affront to socially conquered and constitutionally guaranteed rights. The state, increasingly committed to capitalist sociability, reproduces the neoliberal perspective, which proposes privatizations, outsourcing and fiscal adjustments to the detriment of budget cuts and the dismantling of the legal principles of social policies. Faced with these challenges, the national health policy is unable to guarantee its universalizing aspect and the judicialization of health becomes a concrete mechanism for access to a right guaranteed by the 1988 constitutional text. The phenomenon of the judicialization of health considerably increases the number of lawsuits, causing financial impacts on the public health fund, which in turn leads to significant changes in the provision of services by the Unified Health System. The aim of this study is to analyze the judicialization of health in Maceió and its consequences for the municipal health fund and the impact on the municipality's health services. The methodology used is based on bibliographical research and documentary analysis of national data on the judicialization of health in Brazil and subsequently in Maceió, in order to ascertain whether the responses to judicial demands in health in the municipality occur in the private network or in the public network, and thus to verify the disputes of interests that are at stake and the impacts this has on the municipal health fund and the services provided to health users in Maceió. The scientific method on which this study is based is Marx's historical and dialectical materialism, since the historical-critical perspective allows for an adequate analysis of the constitutive nexuses of reality.
Social Policy; Judicialization of Health; Unified Health System; Public Fund