CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT 95 – ANALYSING ITS IMPACTS ON PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE CONTEXT OF CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Abstract

This research addresses the impacts of Constitutional Amendment 95 on the social order of the Brazilian Constitution, specially concerning public health expenses, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. The aim was to study the political and legal phenomenon of the Amendment and its consequences to the public budget in such historical period, in which Brazilian society demands, more than ever, an efficient heath system. This study was carried out by the lens of the theoretical discussions about the commons, by which public budget may be understood, ideally, as a resource belonging to society. The method consists primarily of a bibliographical research on Constitutional Amendment 95, followed by a documentary research, analyzing an array of government technical reports. We intended to interpret and analyze official data about the federal public budget in Brazil, from the past years and years to come, to answer the question about the consequences of the amendment on public health. We have focused on the “thematic analysisâ€, proposed by Minayo, by which the following steps are performed: pre-analysis (floating reading, constitution of the corpus, hypothesis formulation); material exploration (coding, classification, aggregation of data). Methodological orientation is hypothetico-deductive. The results suggest that the Brazilian public budget is controlled by financial interests commonly opposed to the interests of the public, in such a way that public power sometimes acts as a guarantor of private interests. Although there are several ways to allocate resources to face the coronavirus pandemic, the constitutional amendment certainly limits the capability of national government to provide public health.