Federal budget 2023 x Right to health

Abstract

The Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil considers health as "the right of all and the duty of the State", whose universal and integral access of the population to these services must be guaranteed through the integration between health, social and economic policies. In this perspective, sufficient, adequate and stable financing of the Unified Health System (SUS) is one of the conditions for budget programming capable of effecting the right to health. The public budget as an instrument in which government priorities are expressed in the allocation of resources for the provision of services to society. The SUS has faced a chronic underfunding process, aggravated by the definancing of the enactment of Constitutional Amendment 95/2016 that established a fiscal rule that limits the primary expenditures of the Union to the amounts of expenses paid in 2016 and a federal health and education floor rule equivalent to the respective values of these floors of 2017,  with a term of validity until 2036. The program of the Ministry of Health in the Union Budget Bill 2023 forwarded to the National Congress presented many spending cuts that could compromise the performance of actions and services in progress. The aim of this article is to characterize the resources allocated to the Ministry of Health in the Federal Budget Bill for 2023 as another stage of the contradiction existing in Brazil between the constitutional concept of health as a right of citizenship and the fiscal rules established by constitutional amendment 95/2016.