Primary health care and privatization of health services

This article discussed the hypothesis related to privatization of primary health care services. The discussion is made from the analysis of their public nature in the Brazilian National Public Health System and from the privatization/outsourcing of health services, taking complementary and partnerships as an example. The aim was to understand whether the public nature is a special attribute of this service or whether it is a service included in the scope of health care, devoid of any specificity that prevents its transfer to the private sector. The work analyzes doctrinal concepts and rules of primary health care, the various forms of outsourcing/privatization, and the concept of public service to understand whether primary health care has its genesis in an exclusively public service (that does not allow lato sensu outsourcing) or whether it should be classified as a mandatory public service, but without exclusivity, thus competing with the private sector, which opens the possibility of being the object of complementarity, partnerships, collaboration.