Municipalização plena da saúde: a prática de uma utopia

Abstract

In the 1990s, broke out in Brazil a process of political and administrative decentralization that in the social field of health is clearly directed to management decentralization of local health services. The shift of power management for municipalities favors monitoring, supervision and participation of society in the formulation and implementation of public policies. Health decentralization transforms the municipalities into managers of local health system, and the establishment and consolidation of a Unified Health System depends on the effective capacity of local managers to formulate and implement policies to meet social demands in the federal relationship model of the three levels: federal, state and municipal. The heterogeneity of the Brazilian municipalities, the homogenous applicability of system standardization of the federative entity, and the high participation in the financing of the Unified Health System are factors that facilitate the centralization of power in the federal government. Adopting the methodology of case study, empirically based on the city of Umuarama, in the northwest of Paraná State, this work tries to discuss the local health system structured from a combination of the institutional rules and social peculiarities and local policies .