Túlio Batista Franco

The creation of the health consumer: challenges on health sector regulation after managed care era

BackgroundWe utilized our previous studies analyzing the reforms affecting the health sector developed in the 1990s by financial groups to frame the strategies implemented by the pharmaceutical industry to regain market positions and to understand the challenges that regulatory agencies are confronting.MethodsWe followed an analytical approach for analyzing the process generated by the disputes between the financial groups and the pharmaceutical corporations and the challenges created to governmental regulation. We analyzed primary and secondary sources using situational and discourse analyses. We introduced the concepts of biomedicalization and biopedagogy, which allowed us to analyze how medicalization was radicalized.ResultsIn the 1990s, structural adjustment policies facilitated health reforms that allowed the entrance of multinational financial capital into publicly-financed and employer-based insurance. This model operated in contraposition to the interests of the medical industrial complex, which since the middle of the 1990s had developed silent reforms to regain authority in defining the health-ill-care model. These silent reforms radicalized the medicalization. Some reforms took place through deregulatory processes, such as allowing direct-to-consumer advertisements of prescription drugs in the United States. In other countries different strategies were facilitated by the lack of regulation of other media such as the internet. The pharmaceutical industry also has had a role in changing disease definitions, rebranding others, creating new ones, and pressuring for approval of treatments to be paid by public, employer, and private plans. In recent years in Brazil there has been a substantial increase in the number of judicial claims demanding that public administrations pay for new treatments.ConclusionsWe found that the dispute for the hegemony of the health sector between financial and pharmaceutical companies has deeply transformed the sector. Patients converted into consumers are exposed to the biomedicalization of their lives helped by the biopedagogies, which using subtle mechanisms present discourses as if they are objective and created to empower consumers. The analysis of judicialization of health policies in Brazil could help to understand the complexity of the problem and to develop democratic mechanisms to improve the regulation of the health sector.

Atenção domiciliar na saúde suplementar: dispositivo da reestruturação produtiva

This study discusses the role the Brazilian Home Health Care Program (Programa de Atencao Domiciliar - PAD) plays in supplementary care using the example of a Group Care provider headquartered in Rio de Janeiro. The purpose of the study was to understand how home health care is produced by verifying the interaction between the medical team, beneficiaries and family members considering that the service in this care model is delivered in the micro-political scenery of the process, in the clients own home. The assessment of this program must consider: infrastructure and logistics, beneficiary eligibility criteria, the care-network formed in support of the PAD and above all the work process. Especially the latter is a strong indicator, in the present case characterized by an eminently multi-professional team operating in networks with integrated therapeutic projects. For the professionals, Home Health Care has the meaning of an innovative and highly valuable approach to care delivery. The article concludes considering the PAD an important device for a fruitful restructuring of supplementary care through different ways of care delivery.