The Unified Health System (SUS) and the private assistance sector: interpretations and facts

ABSTRACT The essay discusses problems to reflect on, identify contradictions, as well as discern and formulate political strategies on the privatization of the health system in Brazil, especially the multiple meanings of the Unified Health System (SUS) and about what is public and what is private. It is observed that the relations between public and private seized only by measures (quantity of units, activities and human and financial resources) are underlying interests and negotiations between agents and their political decisions and difficulties to discern the structural features of an unequal health system and segmented from the political conjunctures that reproduce them. Thirty years after the 1988 Constitution, there have been advances, impasses and setbacks, as well as adjustments in the understanding of the SUS and the private sector.