Desigualdade em saúde no Brasil: medida e avaliação

Abstract

The evaluation in inequality in health is widely studied and debated around the world. This subject becomes particularly relevant in the Brazilian context, because Brazil is a country strongly marked by social and economic inequalities.The main objective of this work is to contribute for this discussion, aggregating new elements, mainly as for the methodological aspects of the measure of health status, based on the model of Item Response Theory, and incorporating a new approach in the health inequality, until now mainly based on the comparison of health of different groups and beginning to base the analysis on the distribution of the health of interest groups and the comparison of this with an reference distribution.Data used were from PNAD 2003, particularly the Health Supplement, which included a diagnostic from the Brazilian population health, the access to health services, the coverage by health plan, the use of the health services, the spending on health and the physical mobility conditions. The sample studied was composed by individuals with aged twenty years old or more.Much of the health inequalities detected in this work is similar to other inquires results described in the literature. Results from the health measure showed that 22,9% of the population were classified into the group of lowest health status, in contrast with 14,3% included in the highest health status group. As for the measure of intra-group differences, the results indicated the biggest inequality for women, for the aged people and for those individuals of lesser scholarship and low socioeconomic level.The health inequalities evidenced in this work indicate challenges for the public politics, particularly in the health area, and must be considered to subsidize actions that take care of to the necessities of the population, with focus in the overcoming of the social inequality.