Data for: HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT AND JUDICIAL DEFERENCE TO PRIORITY-SETTING DECISIONS IN HEALTH CARE: EVIDENCE FROM BRAZIL
Description
We obtained an exhaustive list of court cases with claims for healthcare treatments that were filed against Brazil’s public health system from 2011 to 2015 in the capital cities of three Brazilian states: São Paulo, São Paulo; Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul; and Florianópolis, Santa Catarina. The capital cities in each state were chosen with the assumption that the public attorneys defending the national health system there are best prepared to defend the government in court and justify its policy choices. The public attorneys and the public health system have their regional headquarters and staff specialized in responding to claims for healthcare treatments located in the capital cities. Therefore, these are the jurisdictions where any impact from the creation of CONITEC would most likely have occurred. The states selected for analysis are three of the five states with the highest volume of litigation for healthcare treatments in Brazil (CNJ, 2013). Both state and federal court cases were included in Porto Alegre and Florianópolis, but only state court cases could be included in São Paulo because the federal court there lacks an electronic database which prevented a search for relevant court files. Even though court files are publicly accessible, it was not feasible to hand-search the court’s voluminous paper records to locate the relatively small subset of cases involving claims for healthcare treatments. Given the large number of cases, a simple random sampling technique was used for each state-year. The sample size for each state-year combination was chosen to achieve a margin of error of 4% at the 95% confidence level within each state-year. We excluded cases when protected by a court order, when they involved a class action with indeterminate claimants, and when the court files were missing either the claimants’ or respondents’ briefs or the judgments.