Quantitative and qualitative analysis on the legislative production relating to healthcare in passage in the National Congress in the years 2007 and 2008

Abstract

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES: The Federal Constitution of 1988 allowed the National Congress to contribute towards formulation of new public policies. The objective of this study was to analyze the legislative production that dealt with health issues that was in passage in the National Congress between January 2007 and December 2008. DESIGN AND SETTING: Descriptive-exploratory cross-sectional study with quantitative and qualitative approaches, conducted in a federal university. METHODS: The analysis material for the study comprised 144 draft bills that were classified and subsequently randomly evaluated by 155 professionals working within the healthcare system. RESULTS: The analysis showed that the Workers' Party (PT) and Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) were the parties that presented the largest proportions of the draft bills (12.5% and 11.1%); 25.4% of the draft bills were presented by congress members with academic qualifications within healthcare and only 1.4% of the draft bills became transformed into legal regulations. In questionnaire responses, 51.5% of the evaluators did not consider the draft bills to be viable, 40.6% did not consider them to be relevant and 52.5% said that if the draft bills were not approved it would not be harmful to Brazilian society. CONCLUSION: In analyzing the data from this study, it was noted that the legislative production relating to healthcare was low and the transformation rate from draft bill to legal regulation was negligible. The results from the evaluation showed that the quality of legislative production was impaired.