ABSTRACT The Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), since its creation in 1988, has a history of insufficient resources to effectively guarantee universality and comprehensive care. Its underfunding, derived from the lack of support from part of society and neoliberal policies undertaken by various governments in the 1990s and 2000s, turned into effective reduction in real terms of funding resources after the approval of the “expenditure ceiling” in 2016, aggravating the structural system difficulty. The Covid-19 pandemic generated a preeminent need to expand the service capacity of the public health system and, with that, the resources for the SUS were expanded. However, this greater financial availability was the result of extraordinary measures and was restricted to the years 2020 and 2021. The ordinary budget for health in those years and the 2022 LOA demonstrate that the underfunding continues and that the pandemic did not change the lack of priority given to healthcare within the federal budget.

RESUMO O Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS), desde sua criação em 1988, tem um histórico de recursos insuficientes que permitam efetivamente garantir a universalidade e a integralidade do cuidado. Seu subfinanciamento, derivado da ausência de apoio de parte da sociedade e de políticas neoliberais assumidas por diversos governos nos anos 1990 e 2000, transformou--se em um efetivo desfinanciamento a partir da aprovação do “teto de gastos”, em 2016, agravando as dificuldades estruturais do sistema. A pandemia de Covid-19 gerou uma necessidade preeminente de ampliação da capacidade de atendimento do sistema público de saúde e, com isso, os recursos para o SUS foram ampliados. Essa maior disponibilidade financeira, porém, foi fruto de medidas extraordinárias e ficou restrita aos anos de 2020 e 2021. O orçamento ordinário destinado à saúde nesses anos e a LOA de 2022 explicitam que o desfinanciamento se mantém e que a pandemia não gerou priorização da saúde da população brasileira no interior do orçamento federal.

This paper investigates the relationship between the impact of Bolsa Família Program in the Brazilian population and the result of the presidential elections of 2006. The database involves municipal information provided by MDS, IBGE and TSE. To control the experiment, the eventual influences of other variables in the determination of this relationship had been studied. All those variables come from specific characteristics of the cities, such as: city with predominant urban or not urban population; size of the city population; among others. The results state that the Bolsa Família was, in fact, a very important factor in the determination of the votes in Lula. It was, in itself, responsible by 45% of the total votes in Lula.