Brazil’s healthcare system unprepared for fast-aging population

Twenty-seven-year-old Fábio Cruz lost hope in Brazil’s public health system when his mother suffered a stroke. Doctors at a downtown casualty unit sent him home, diagnosing his 60-year old mother with a bout of “stress.” When Mr. Cruz took his mother to Albert Schweizer public hospital in Realengo days later, doctors rushed her to treatment, shocked at her condition.

“There are good people in the public health system,” sighs Mr. Cruz. “But others are completely unprepared.”

At a moment when politicians across Brazil have focused their efforts on reforming the country’s ailing pension system amid rapid demographic changes, the topic of healthcare for Brazil’s senior citizens has received little attention.

But just as the Brazilian pension system will require major adaptations to shoulder the burden of an aging population, so too will the country’s public health system, the SUS. For Mr. Cruz and millions of others, the system is inadequate in caring for their elderly family members—75 percent of which rely on the SUS exclusively for their healthcare, according to the Ministry of Health.

Brazil’s population of senior citizens is set to triple over the next 30 years, accounting for nearly a third of the country’s population by 2050. The same demographic change that took France 120 years to achieve between 1860 and 1980, Brazil is set to undertake in 20, making the country home to the sixth-largest elderly population in the world by 2025. 

The shift itself is the result of simultaneous drops in fertility rates and increased life expectancy, just as much the fruit of Brazil’s modernizing economy as improvements in healthcare. But as healthcare improved, the country saw a profound epidemiological transition. That is, where infectious...