Coronavirus, the teacher of the catastrophe: lessons learnt about Public Health System and the relationship between public and private sectors

Abstract

Based on political, economic and social conditions prior to the pandemic, the text discusses the dramatic consequences of the privatization processes of the Brazilian Unified Health System for the implementation of effective actions against COVID-19. The reforms promoted by the Brazilian State in recent years, namely tax adjustments, labor and social security reforms and Constitutional Amendment 95, correlate, as preconditions to the current scenario and related to the privatization of the national health system, the effects of which have been harmful to the working class, as well as to the public health. In this context, determined by the devastating corporate form of capital, the transfer of public resources to private health sector is brutal. It is deduced, therefore, that the pandemic deepens the impacts in term of the vulnerability of labor and the de-financing of the Unified Health System in its multiple dimensions. The text concludes by emphasizing that the pedagogy of the catastrophe caused by the pandemic does not ensure the improvement or overcoming the current sociability, and may even result in more barbarism, which, ultimately, can only be prevented if new social norms are created for the benefit of the entire of humanity.