Eficiência do gasto público em saúde: uma análise comparativa dos municípios com mais casos de COVID-19 e Região Metropolitana de Fortaleza

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic brought several changes in the world. Countries, states, and municipalities has needed to adapt to the new scenario and governments. They tried to make operations and use resources efficiently to overcome the difficulties faced in this period and meet the demands of the population. Thus, in this work, an analysis of the efficiency of public spending on health is carried out in the municipalities of the State of Ceará that most registered cases of Covid-19, in addition to the municipalities that are part of the Metropolitan Region of Fortaleza, through the BCC model oriented to outputs of Data Envelopment Analysis. The objective is to verify the efficiency of each municipality during the pandemic period and whether the number of cases was a factor influencing the level of efficiency. For this, the expenses committed with health, equipment, professionals, and beds were used as inputs; and as outputs health facilities, vaccination coverage, hospitalizations, outpatient production and mortality, which refer to the year 2019 to 2021. For the analysis to be carried out, it was divided into 5 scenarios. The results were found and the growth of the of municipalities 100% efficient from 2019 to 2021 is from 11 to 17, the reduction of the efficiency of municipalities and a lower level of efficiency municipalities that have more resources available and the finding of a nonrelationship of Covid-19 cases and effectiveness. Regarding the specific Covid-19 scenario, there were 20 efficient municipalities in 2020 and 23 in 2021. Thus, it was concluded that there was no direct relationship between the cases of Covid-19 and the efficacy, a fact which does not confirm the hypothesis tested that a greater quantity of resources does not mean greater level of efficiency.