Lourenço Canuto Reporter Agência Brasil
Brasília – On paper, it is a formidable structure: universal health care free of charge from the cradle to the grave. Public hospitals and doctors who are civil servants. On paper it looks really good and it is in the constitution. But, an opinion poll by Ibope, a traditional Brazilian pollster, at the request of the National Confederation of Industry (“CNI”), found that the majority of Brazilians are not happy with their universal public health system.
The Ibope/CNI poll interviewed 2,002 people around the country and found that 61% of them said the Brazilian public health system was bad or terrible. Only 10% of those interviewed said it was good or excellent.
There were some regional variations. The system got its best marks in the south, where 30% of those interviewed said the quality of care they got was good or excellent. However, in the northeast, 62% said the quality was bad or terrible.
Asked if they saw any changes in the system, 42% of those interviewed said they saw no improvement, while 43% said it was getting worse.
Many of those interviewed mentioned the vaccination campaigns by the government, saying they were the most visible aspect of the system.
Among those interviewed, 24% had private health plans, most of them paid in part by employers.
Allen Bennett – translator/editor The News in English
