Judicialization of health: An analysis of the phenomenon and its consequences to Brazilian society

Abstract

Although the Brazilian National Health System advanced since its creation, there are still failures in supplying medicines and services. For this reason, citizens have been using the judicial system to acquire health assets, what is known as judicialization of health. In the last years, this practice had an abrupt increase. This work has the purpose of analyzing the lawsuits that request provision of health assets through SUS to provide greater understanding of the effects of the naturalization of judicialization of health. To do this, a bibliographic review was conducted, besides the analysis of 100 lawsuits on the Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de São Paulo’s website. The results indicated that in 2010, the government spending on judicialization of health was R$ 120 million, whereas in 2016 it was around R$ 1.6 billion, reaching 1,346,931.00 actions moved in Brazil. The descriptive analysis demonstrated that, in the same year, nearly 22.1% of the selected lawsuits requested medicines, which are standardized by SUS. In relation to the other requests, 82.8% disposed of therapeutic alternative available in public system. The numbers demonstrate the destabilization of budget planning to the health sector caused by judicialization. It is necessary to seek strategies to ensure the right to health and to enlarge the knowledge of standardized lists provided in public system to doctors and judges. The judicialization will therefore remain available to guarantee rights in cases not covered by the health system, without the excesso of lawsuits damaging the budget planning and universal access to the system.