Regionalization in healthcare: (in)visibility and (im)materiality of the universal access and comprehensiveness in health in changing institutionalities

Abstract

Regionalization is a strategy of organization and integration of services in national health systems, in a path to be followed toward comprehensiveness and universal access. However, its principles are still invisible in Brazilian society, and the forms of management in health regions are questioned, as well as its actual effects on the construction of health as a right. This article is dedicated to such questioning and falls as a production aiming to denature processes and enable the emergence of events put into invisibility because of the “discursive formations” of health regionalization. This study comprises the regionalization process of Ceará’s health system since the 1990s. This is a qualitative study that examines the reports of 23 state managers of health, as well as the documentary narratives related to this issue. This study aims to build “bundles of relations”, articulating the subjects and institutions in the production of “knowledge-power and truth-power”, according to Foucault’s reference, and in dialogue with public health authors. The regionalization of Ceará points to a reform of the health sector, delegating the management and provision of services to the Social Organization and to the consortium, on procedural and productive contracting, strengthening the “entrepreneurship” of health and thus affecting the production of comprehensiveness and universality. We conclude that the Unified Health System’s constitutional stratum is undergoing a breaking process, forging another “regime of comprehensiveness and universality”, that can be observed in the fact that the Unified Health System is between institutionalities, and in the change from the right to health care to customer right in a reductionist shift.