Universal, completely unrestricted, free, fundamental right... What a rosy picture you're painting. You can't possibly have ever dealt with this crap if that's what you think. I gotta wonder if you're even brazilian.

This is a system that tells citizens they have a constitutional right to health and that providing it is the state's responsibility. Rights are incredibly expensive though. Giving people "rights" is amazing when you're up for election. When the time to actually pay up comes, though, politicians can't leave the room fast enough.

The result is of course scarcity. There isn't enough for everyone. How do you manage scarcity in a supposedly universal system? Rationing, triaging. The system is forced to decide who's eligible for medical resources. People show up at the "basic health unit" at 3 in the morning and stand in massive lines so they can try to get a consult. There's often a literal quota of how many exams doctors can order per period of time, even cheap blood tests. The amount of bureaucracy you need to go through to get something like a CT scan or even an ultrasound is truly incredible. It can literally take years just to get a consult with a specialist who will actually fill out the paperwork you need. When faced with all this, most people just give up. Some seek the private sector. Others seek the justice system which just pens out an order for the city to pay up, screwing over literally everything and everyone else. They do that with the private sector too, making it increasingly unprofitable.

So we have a population that demands the best from doctors even though they have few resources with which to provide care. There are places in this country where doctors don't even have a sink they can use to wash their hands and yet they are are expected to attend to patients and solve all their problems in ten minutes each. That's how poorly developed this country is. If you're a doctor in these parts, defensive documentation is a vital skill: you have to literally write down stuff like "I wanted to do X but couldn't because X wasn't available" lest they accuse you of criminal negligence. This is especially true in emergency care, there are places here where you're essentially practicing war medicine. Emergency care basically turned into a dead end job that only doctors fresh out of medical school accept so they can make some money while they prepre for residency. Anyone with options would rather work elsewhere where they can practice medicine with a minimum of quality.

So people expect you to do more with less, sometimes with nothing. Do they value your work more for it? No. Doctor salaries are decreasing, autonomy is decreasing, insatisfaction is increasing. Doctors themselves don't get even paid on time: government being like 3 months late on payments is very common today. Another common practice: some small town mayor offers ridiculously high salaries to attract doctors and then just stops paying them when the money runs out. Sometimes a judge will even prevent doctors from leaving due to lack of payment because apparently the people have a constitutional right to their slave labor. Result: doctors wised up and now these regions just don't get any medical assistance at all because you'd have to be stupid to accept a job there. As a result, Lula wants to import doctors from Cuba and put them to work there.

This is also a huge theme here. Government just blames it all on doctors. Doctors don't want to go work for free in some shitty undeveloped region or the literal Amazon jungle? It's because they're mercenaries who care only about money. Their solution isn't less corruption and actual development of the nation but turning the medical profession into cheap labor. Lula is literally quoted saying "we need to create a new generation of leftist doctors who accept working for less". His solution to all this is to flood the job market with doctors by importing them from Cuba, increasing the number of medical schools, you name it. Low quality medical schools created just to pocket the sweet government student loans, often without even so much as a hospital for students to practice in. Quality of doctors is declining. Doctors screwing up classic myocardial infarction cases are making national news. Government couldn't care less, politicians don't get treated at such places, they go to Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital.