Abstract
The paper retraces the history of the creation of the Health Dispute Resolution Chamber (CRLS), a public agency in the city of Rio de Janeiro responsible for trying to out-of-court forward the demands of people who intend to sue the State to access a health service or good. Based on a combination of literature review, documentary research, and fieldwork, I discuss how the formulation of the CRLS constitutes a simultaneous process of diagnosing failures and proposing solutions for health disputes. In dialogue with an anthropological approach to the State and public policies, I argue that the elaboration of state management mechanisms and institutions cannot be detached from the very production of problematic issues in which the public power must intervene. Thus, if, on the one hand, the inauguration of the Chamber contributes decisively to consolidating the “excessive judicialization of health” and the “slowness of the Judiciary” as problems, on the other hand, its performance reinforces the idea that the best way to face them is through “de-judicialization”, promoting the administrative resolution of conflicts between citizens and the State.
Keywords:
Healthcare; litigation; Slowness; Public Policies; De-judicialization