The Brazilian health system between norms and facts: mitigated universalization and subsidized stratification.

This paper will focus on recent changes in the relationships between the public and the private sector within the health assistance network, by analyzing selected information on health services and on legal rules related to supporting the private assistance subsystem. This approach recasts analyses which articulate the simultaneous examination of both the material and political instances that permanently redefine the range of activity of SUS. Considering the limitations of the empirical bases here analyzed, one questions the implied assumptions in the meanings of autonomy sustained both in the public and in the private components, departing from hypotheses on the delineation of independent tendencies toward the expansion of universal coverage and he restratification of supply and demand.